The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph MillardMonarch Books, 1964Price I paid: this is my third Interlibrary Loan book in a row

It began with the landing of nine meteors in Kansas. Then, suddenly, it exploded into a massive catastrophe.

First, the meteorite investigating team were turned into automatons, ruled by an unknown, alien intelligence. They barricaded themselves from the world and began building a rocket project, aimed at traversing the stars.

Only a few escaped the invasion from outer space, among them astrophysicist Curt Temple, whose girl friend, Lee Mason, was enslaved, her personality changed.

Curt knew he had to pit his slim knowledge against the most perfect intelligence in the cosmos to save the world—and the woman he loved.

I have two sets of thank yous to send out before I begin this review. The first is to Erika, who brought this book to my attention in the first place, and the second is to the University of Georgia library system, who lent it to me. Some hands of applause, please.

Another hand of applause for Jack Thurston, the artist behind this incredible cover art. Even though it turns out that this cover art doesn’t have much at all to do with the contents of the book, it’s still amazing. I wasn’t aware of Thurston until I just googled him, and here’s a sampling of his other work. It’s fairly standard pulp art, and I like it a lot. One book I see listed is The Spitfires and I think I might have to look that one up because it sounds incredible. He’s probably best known for his movie posters, I would guess. The Flight of the Phoenix and One Million Years B.C. are both iconic.

The back cover synopsis of this novel is typical in its inaccuracies so I won’t harp on it too much. Mainly I want to point out that yes, there is a rocket project, but no, it does not “traverse the stars.” It goes as far as the Moon. It does turn out that the aliens are from “the stars,” and I guess they want to get back somehow, but that all comes later. After-the-book-is-over later, in fact.

What I want to bring to your attention is the fact that the synopsis uses the phrase “girl friend.” Something about seeing that phrase as two separate words sure does make me think of the late 50s/early 60s. It’s just one of those tiny little language things, and I love it so much. The same is true of “boy friend,” of course. It’s the 20th century equivalent of “Maffachuffets.”

I wonder when that began to change? We were definitely spelling it “boyfriend/girlfriend” in the 90s when I was in school. I didn’t start seeing “bf/gf” until the mid-aughts, I guess, but I’m always behind the times on everything like that.

Anyway, thanks for coming to Thomas’s Linguistics Corner. Stay tuned for your regularly-scheduled book review, after a word from our sponsor.

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The Gods Hate Kansas turned out to be a pretty good book. I don’t know much at all about our author. This is his only listed science fiction novel, although it appears he had some short stories in the genre also. There was a Joseph Millard who was a Republican senator (Nebraska) from 1901 to 1907. Whoever wrote his Wikipedia page included this bit:

There was also a Joseph Millard who wrote science fiction novels, but there is no relation between the two men.[citation needed]

Because there’s no citation, I’m going to choose to believe that the assertion is false!

Anyway I think the author also wrote some Westerns.

I’m dancing around here, avoiding getting around to the book itself. I don’t know why I’m doing that. The book was fine. I’m gonna start talking about it for real now.

It kicks off by introducing us to a dirt farmer family, the Solles, in Kansas. Right off the bat we learn that the book’s title is true, because there’s no rain and the bank’s gonna take the farm.

(Actually the reason the book is named what it is comes later.)

Instead of rain, something else falls from the sky. It starts out as eleven meteors in a crisp flying-V formation, but two of them explode on entry. The remaining nine land on the Solle Farm, and then we cut to Science People.

Our main guy in this book is Curtis Temple, Professor of Astrophysics and Meteoritics at Culwain University. He is a typical pulp hero of this sort. In the movie, he was played by this guy:

Robert Hutton, the Man Who Wasn’t Jimmy Stewart (imdb.com)

The movie I’m talking about is They Came from Beyond Space (1967), which was based on this book. It is, apparently, terrible.

This picture will eventually make sense. (imdb.com)

Temple is told about the meteors that landed in Kansas. This is the big one, what he’s been waiting for. It’s the most important thing that could ever possibly happen to him, career-wise. He gets his team together, up to and including his department assistant and fiancée, Lee Mason.

Mason is described as “a respected scientist in her own right” who “knew almost as much about his specialty as he did.” On the surface that seems pretty nice. It’s good to have a female character who is competent. I even thought, for a little while, that she avoided being a stock woman-in-distress figure. I was wrong about that, but I entertained the idea for a moment, which is more than usual.

There is an occasional whiff of “she’s a competent woman outside of the kitchen and therefore exceptional,” but that might be unavoidable given the time period. That doesn’t make it okay, so make sure you’re not doing it now.

What stuck with me is that the name “Lee Mason” sounds masculine and I got confused on more than one occasion. Also, she’s referred to by her last name a lot, just like the men are, which didn’t help matters. This is a poor reflection on me more than anything.

Temple is one step away from leaving when the president of the university tells him he’s not allowed to go. The rest of his team can, and they can send him all the information he needs, but Temple was in an accident recently and needs time to recover. The university can’t risk him coming to harm.

The accident led to him getting a silver plate put in his head to hold his skull together. I think we can all guess that this will somehow be IMPORTANT.

Temple sulks for a bit but then jumps into the task of reviewing all the data sent back by his team. And then the data stops coming and he goes to figure out why.

We, the readers, aren’t completely out of the loop. We’re there when the science team cracks open the shell on one of these meteors and are all mind controlled by a mysterious invisible force.

And when Temple goes to investigate, it turns out the mysterious invisible force won’t work on him because of the silver plate in his head. Temple doesn’t figure that out for a little while, though.

When he arrives in Kansas, he finds that the farm where the meteorites hit has been turned into a fortified bunker. He’s not able to get in. He meets an FBI agent who was played in the movie by Maurice Good, but in my head was definitely Kyle MacLachlan because he is all FBI agents to me forever. The two swap some data before the agent is overcome by what is later referred to as the Crimson Plague. Basically all his blood vessels explode and it’s pretty gross.

This plague starts hitting all over the place and the world descends into a panic. Meanwhile, Temple is trying to figure out if it has any connection to this bunker and whatever’s going up inside of it. He gets in and finds out that his girl friend is heading up this whole thing! Whaaaaat

I can’t remember a lot of the details from this book. A lot happened very quickly, it felt like. Somewhere, though, Temple figures out that there are some kind of aliens taking over the minds of people and forcing them to do stuff. The aliens are building a space ship that can go to the moon very quickly.

One thing about this book that I liked is that nobody came across as stupid. For instance, when the alien inhabiting Lee Mason’s body explains that all of this is benevolent, that the aliens knew about the Crimson Plague and are helping take the corpses of the dead to the Moon where they can’t hurt anybody, Temple calls BS and lists reasons why. Later, he figures that playing along will help him get out, so he hollers like “Hey, aliens (heyliens), I thought about it and I totally think you’re telling the truth now” and the aliens go “We’re not friggin stupid, a-hole.”

This reminds me that there was very little swearing in this book, to the point where I was a tiny bit shocked when one character called another a son of a bitch. To be more accurate, a very drunk character called another a “shun of a bish,” but still.

With some ingenuity, Temple breaks free and captures Lee Mason—

I just realized that the reason her name seems so masculine is because it reminds me of Lee Marvin

—and takes her (and alien ridealong) to his friend and fellow scientist, Farge. Farge is played in the movie by Zia Mohyeddin, who was also in freakin’ Lawrence of Arabia, so that’s wild. He was also in Danger Man with the woman who played Lee Mason, Jennifer Jayne. I don’t know if they were in any of the same episodes, though.

Together, Temple and Farge do a lot of science and figure out what’s going on. The aliens are invisible but they figure out some special glasses that fix that. Here’s where they figure out that the aliens can’t penetrate silver. Also, there’s some hooey about how the aliens are Pure Thought Energy and the book gets pretty deep into what that is supposed to mean. Most importantly, Temple was able to confiscate an alien energy weapon, and with Farge is able to turn it into a weapon that kills the aliens but leaves humans relatively unharmed. They test it on Lee Mason and free her from the alien menace, whereupon she stops being the MacGuffin and is able to contribute to the rest of the story.

The trio storms the alien compound and ends up on one of the alien rocket ships to the Moon. Once on the Moon, they learn all of the terrible truth about everything, and it turns out to be a pretty okay twist.

The aliens are the Xacrns. Despite all appearances, they’re not trying to take over the Earth. In fact, they’re not even all that evil! They’re just trying to survive and get back home. They also don’t have emotions.

The book has some kooky ideas about evolution and hammers home this idea that it’s always “upward,” whatever that means. It turns out that the Xacrns are “super-evolved” beyond bodies and emotions, but because they’ve reached the “pinnacle” of evolution, that somehow means that they’ll have to die soon? I dunno. It’s both nonsensical and cliché.

The Crimson Plague doesn’t kill people, it just renders them in a state where the Xacrns can take them to the Moon and use them to build a way back to their homeworld. The Xacrn’s usual client species, the Vard, are getting old and dying, which is why they need humans.

So Curt Temple tells the Xacrns the most shocking thing of all: They Could Have Just Asked.

There’s this passage I’m going to quote that is so pure and wonderful and cornball that I have to quote it in full:

We cry at sad pictures and lost kittens and send CARE packages to the underprivileged in lands we’ve never even seen. You can’t understand that but you’re going to have to in order to save yourselves. We call it the human spirit and it’s the reason you could conquer the Earth but never conquer human beings. It’s the tool that can rescue your race.

Page 123

Yeah so it turns out that emotions are the thing that saves the day, and that to save themselves, the Xacrns will have to “de-evolve” themselves back to having them. And then they can understand friendship, and the humans will happily help them with anything they need to get home.

And that’s the end.

I’m struggling hard against my cynical side here. The fact that my entire experience in life tells me that the entire Human Spirit speech is crap is fighting against the part of me that knows What We Could Be and it’s a stalemate. It usually is.

Like, it’s nice how crying at lost kittens is to our credit, but our author didn’t say anything about genocide to balance it out.

Still, it’s nice to read a book where the Great Human Virtue that saves the day isn’t “the drive for freedom” or “unconquerability” or “sheer bloody-mindedness” but is, basically, sentimentality.

I have been waiting five years for the perfect article to link this video in

Is this a great book? Hell no. It suffers from some real pacing problems and is sometimes a bit hard to follow. It has one single woman who, while competent, is also described as “softly rounded” more than anything else. She’s also In Distress for most of the book, although once that’s over, she holds her own pretty well. It’s also got some kooky science ideas floating around, but it’s on par with most pulp.

Oh, the book’s title is a reference to the idea that more meteorites strike Kansas than anywhere else in the world. To the best of my knowledge, this is true only in the world of the book. However, it’s explained in the book that the Xacrns need helium to power their ship back home. Their meteor-ships are attracted to helium like a magnet, because they need to find it. It turns out that they keep landing in Kansas because there’s so much helium buried there. And that part’s true! Neat.

But if the aliens need helium, the second most abundant element in the universe, I’m sure they could find it in space much more easily than mining it out from under Kansas by means of mind control.

*shrug*

Still, it’s nice that Friendship Saves the Day.

Here’s a thing I’m wondering about:

So a lot of these “mind control” stories of the era, The Puppet Masters, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc., were explicitly about Communist Infiltration. Heinlein was a lot of things, but subtle wasn’t often one of them.

Anyway, the solution to so many of those stories turns out to be that Freedom wins because Individuality and America and Bootstraps.

The Gods Hate Kansas, on the other hand, ended in the spirit of cooperation. The aliens weren’t wiped out or beaten back, they were negotiated with and befriended. Their differences were recognized and accepted, even the ones that seemed inhuman, monstrous even. And everybody won. (Except for a lot of dead humans and aliens along the way).

So I guess I’m asking if this is an example of the very rare Cold War sci-fi that suggested that maybe the Commies aren’t so bad, and maybe if we would just stop yelling at each other we’d be able to set aside our differences and build a better world.

“One citizen of your planet shall go to the capital of the Federation of Worlds. He shall live there for thirty days. If your representative can survive and demonstrate the ability to exist in a civilized society with creatures whose outward appearance and manner of thinking differ from his own, you shall pass the test. You will be permitted to send your starships to other planets of the galaxy.

If he fails the test, if prejudice, fear, intolerance, or stupidity trip him up, then your world will be sealed off from the stars forever!”

This was the ultimatum from space. The task before our world then was—who shall go? What man or woman could be found to take this frightening test for the whole of humanity and be certain not to fail?

It’s an edge-of-the-seat science-fiction thriller.

from the inside flap

First off, let’s talk about this cover art. It’s the best, right? The two main things about it are that it’s by Ed Emshwiller and it’s the best art that anyone has ever put on the cover of an Ace paperback. I’m sure this is a contestable statement, but I don’t care. I stand by this statement and shall continue to do so for as long as I can bear it in the face of mild confrontation.

This is part two of the Ace Double from the last review. Despite Wandl being the reason I got the whole shebang in the first place, I Speak for Earth was the one I was looking forward to. Yeah, partly for the cover, but mainly for the plot. Of course, we all know how wrong plot synopses from the publisher tend to be, but I figured that the book would be worth reading regardless. After all, Keith Woodcott was a pseudonym of John Brunner, whose last book I reviewed was…aw heck, it was bad, wasn’t it?

Whatever, a lot of people like Brunner, and the ones I’ve talked to also didn’t like The Wrong End of Time, so I came into this book thinking positive thoughts about him. Most importantly, those thoughts turned out to be justified. This was a great book.

It was, however, great in some ways that need qualifying. It’s got some severe of-its-time problems that will need addressing. Nonetheless, the book strives to make a point that is not only positive but is still relevant to this day, something that might have disappointed our dear author. But now I’m just teasing you, so let’s get into it.

We start by meeting Gyul Kodran. He’s an alien from somewhere in the vicinity of Spica. He’s addressing the United Nations. Gyul Kodran has been observing humanity, publicly, for some time. He’s been interacting with us, even choosing to revive Esperanto so that he can talk to humans without favoring one language over another, remaining neutral.

And hey, this is our first instance of how the book favors Western Civilization to the expense of the rest of the world, but you can tell Brunner was trying to be well-meaning. The idea of a neutral world language is great. I’m a budding Esperantist myself, but I don’t kid myself. It’s a conlang based on European languages, not “Earth languages.” It’s not neutral because it, from its creation, ignores everything from Navajo to Mandarin to !Kung. The fact that it had some Greek in it was a surprise to me, honestly.

Gyul Kodran tells us that his—and the book scores points for lampshading the use of this pronoun, since we don’t know if Gyul Kodran is male or even is from a species where that is a relevant idea—decision is that while humanity has a long way to go before it reaches the level of Galactic Civilization, it might well be able to join it. The problems, he says, are that we’re so liable to hate on one another for the stupidest crap. We need to get over that. After all, if things like skin color set us off on xenophobic wars against one another, how will humanity react to nine-foot-tall flea people? Heck, one of the reasons nobody knows what Gyul Kodran looks like is because he’s well aware that he’d be hated. He knows a lot about us.

The solution, then, is a Test. One person, a representative of the best humanity has to offer, will be sent to live among the Galactic Community for one month. If he or she can survive, then Earth will be allowed to enter the Federation. If not, it will be barred from entry forever. Any attempts to leave the Solar System will be met with hostile force. There is no appeal. We have one year of prep time.

This book is one of those “humanity is special” narratives, but by golly, it’s one that does it right! The obvious route Brunner could have taken was to spend the next year finding the Übermensch to save us all. This is the plot that would have happened in about 99% of novels with this premise. Instead, Brunner did something awesome. He accentuated the human community over the individual. As a result, humanity does what we do best.

We cheat.

Once it becomes clear that there is no way to safely allow a single person to represent our entire species, the scientists get to work. They’re going to build the Superman.

Then we meet is Joe Morea. Joe is your classic white dude spaceman genius, and as a result he’s basically our viewpoint character for most of the book. Joe is told that he’s to be selected as a candidate for this Space Test. He’s hesitant at first—I got the feeling that this was one of those “If you jump at the chance you’re not the right person” kinds of things—but he goes all in after some convincing. Over the course of a large part of the rest of the book, he’s tested physically and psychologically. The science team tries to discover if Joe has any phobias floating beneath the surface. After all, it would be terrible to discover he’s terrified of spiders right around the same time he meets the Spider People of Arcturus Prime, right?

Of course he passes all the tests with flying colors, so he’s sent to meet the other finalists. They are:

Rohini Das, an Indian mathematician and poet

Stepan Prodshenko, a Soviet physicist and gymnast

King Ti-Pao, a Chinese biologist and painter

Lawrence Tshekele, a Nigerian linguist and educator

I cribbed basically all of these little bios from the first page of the book, which is a list of characters. Normally I dislike it when that kind of thing is in a book. I figure that the author wouldn’t need it if they just did a better job of distinguishing and developing their characters. In I Speak for Earth, it turns out that Brunner didn’t need a the page because he did a good job of distinguishing and developing his characters. Also the book was super short and didn’t have very many of them. What gives?

Another large chunk of the book features Joe getting to know these other people. A lot of mutual respect forms, with little to no animosity. In fact, this book doesn’t have a lot of conflict at all. That’s kind of the point?

Having this diverse set of characters is great. Brunner, and through him, our main viewpoint character for the time being, treats them all with the respect they are owed. These people are the best humanity has to offer, and there’s never once any attempt to contradict that fact based on their race, sex, age, religion, or whatever.

There are some icky bits, though, and it’s partly due to the time this book was written and partly due to Brunner’s own unconcious prejudices that come from being on the colonizer’s side. These bits tend to be on the subject of Africa.

Lawrence is a joyful character and one of my favorites, but he also tends to give voice to some unfortunate tropes. I can’t think of any way to describe it other than to say that when he talks about Africa, he talks about it like a European, and it’s kind of gross.

He’s the one that frequently says that going to this alien world will be similar to a native African—sometimes the word “savage” is used—being transported to modern New York. I get the point that Brunner is trying to make here, but it’s handled so poorly. At its worst, we get a statement comparing Europe’s “2000 years of civilization” versus Africa’s “two generations” of it.

Because the only real “civilization” is the one with industry and capitalism? Is that what our author is saying? Or is it more insidious? That the only “real” civilization is the one run by white people?

And to have our African character be the one to give voice to these sentiments is…gross. I think maybe Brunner was actually trying to avoid being gross by having Lawrence be the one to say them, but it was a misstep.

The civilizations arising from India and China don’t get treated this way, so I feel like it’s less of a race thing than a vague sense of “progress,” but maybe I’m just trying to make excuses for an otherwise very good novel.

So after the characters get to know one another and go through some trials together, we get to find out the truth of what’s happening. The Test will not be taken by one person. It will be taken by six. Earth scientists have discovered a way to transfer the personality of one person into the body of another. Even better, it’s possible for one person to hold on to several of these personalities. We don’t get much detail on how, exactly, this is supposed to work, but that’s okay because it’s not the point of the book.

Joe is to be the host for the other personalities. Joining the other four will be Dr. Fritz Schneider, the scientist who created the process. He tells us that he has tested the process once before. He was able to merge his personality with his wife’s. He says that the process is incredibly intimate: After thirty yeas of marriage he believed that he knew everything about his wife, but was quickly disabused of that belief. Now we’re doing it with six people who have known each other for a few weeks.

This is the reason I love this book. The message is that the community is far greater than the individual, and that a diverse community is even better than a monolithic one. It’s only when we work with one another that we can succeed against the greatest odds and against our greatest enemy: ourselves. It’s not the aliens that are going to take away our future, it’s our own stupidity. And this is how we fight against that.

And that’s what happens. Our six people get merged into one and spend a few pages getting used to the idea. They learn to work as a unit. They’re able to communicate so much faster than with speech, so their strengths are immediately on display and able to combine into greater strengths.

By the time all this happens, we have about thirty pages left in the book. It’s a short one, about 120 pages, and it ran at a breakneck speed.

Gyul Kodran shows up on time and takes our team on board his ship. Instead of a journey, it just happens that the team wakes up on an alien planet with no recollection of the passing of time. They also have no guides, no food, no information at all. It’s almost as if they’re supposed to fail…

There’s a fair amount of wandering around for the final pages, with our folks all using specialties to figure out what’s going on by working together. For instance, the combination of Rohini’s math skills and Stepan’s gymnastic skills mean that they’re able to accurately calculate the gravity on this planet. Stuff like that. It’s nice.

The first aliens they meet look like ears of corn. They don’t seem especially friendly. Other aliens show up, and our team finally meets Gyul Kodran in his true form (a brown thing), and the overwhelming impression our heroes start to take away is that they are neither expected nor wanted here. It’s very strange.

While exploring, our team follows one of the Corn People in an attempt to see what it’s doing. They hope to learn something about it. After a while, it falls down and stops moving. A bunch of other Corn People show up and announce that humans are terrible! They just stand around and watch while other sentient creatures die!

Our heroes quickly see this for what it is. The Corn People hate the humans and want them gone. It’s Lawrence who compares it to the colonial tendencies of Europeans to set arbitrary tests for non-whites, just so they can fail and justify oppression and feelings of superiority. Since there was no way for the humans to know anything about what was going on, there was no way for them to help.

But they get put on trial anyway. It’s at this point that the individual personalities start to fade and become an amalgam, which the text calls Man. I hate that this book consistently referred to both humanity and this gestalt creature that is 1/3 female as purely masculine, but it was the sixties and everybody was doing it. It’s not like I’m shocked.

Anyway, Man defends humanity and states that the real villain here are the aliens, who are afraid of humans. Man states that all of the alien species it’s met on this adventure are homogeneous groups with no distinct personalities. Humans are an anomaly to them, capable of working together despite differences, although they choose not to do so more often than not.

It’s a big speech that goes on for about a page and it’s pretty great. At one point I started to get afraid that the book was going to refute its earlier point and become a polemic about the power of the individual, but of course that never happened. It was much more subtle than that.

The book argues that a successful community is a diverse one, where every member has its own strengths to add to the group. The communities of the Federation, however, are stagnant. Moreover, they’re afraid of the changes that a species like humanity would bring about to their galactic community.

In short, Humans are Special. We just also have Problems.

With all that said, Gyul Kodran says that he was on humanity’s side the entire time and declares that it has passed the Test.

We cut back to Earth, and it’s bittersweet. The final chapter chooses to focus not on the victory, but on what was lost in the process. We’ve gained a superman—the gestalt consciousness in Joe’s body came back to Earth—but we’ve lost six individual humans in the process. Humans with families and friends and lives. The book ends with that in mind, balanced against a worldwide parade of victory.

Damn! What an ending!

I can understand it if some folks think this book might be a little on the preachy side. That’s understandable. It’s not exactly subtle. Still, it’s some preachiness that needs preaching, and the book has multiple examples of why, most of which remain relevant.

For instance, after the Test is announced, we get this glimpse of a guy on the street hollering about the unfairness of it all. These aliens claim to be tolerant, but why can’t they tolerate our intolerance? Huh, answer me that? Hypocrites! Not trustworthy!

I mean, when I read that paragraph, it sent chills up my spine. It was “So much for the tolerant Left,” right there in text, hollering at me from across fifty-eight years of humanity not learning a damned thing.

Is the book a Masterpiece? Nah. It’s fine and its heart is in the right place, but some parts didn’t age well at all. It’s a fine message, but in the light of the passage of time, it seems like some of the details contradict that fine message.

Nevertheless, the book is a decent rallying cry about how we can all do better in the future. It manages this both through its explicit moral and its implicit tendencies to downplay non-European cultures in a way that goes against that explicit moral.

It’s a book that says “You can do better than me, and I hope you do.” I doubt that this was Brunner’s intention when he wrote it, but that’s fine. Time’ll do that to a book.

Wandl the Invader by Ray CummingsAce Books, 1961Originally published in Astounding Stories, 1932Price I paid: none

There were nine major planets in the Solar System and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet—a maverick!

This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.

But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and traveling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!

It’s a terrific novel from the classic days of great science-fiction adventure—now first published in book form.

From the inside flap

First off, big thanks to the University of Missouri library in Rolla Rolla for sending me this so I could read it.

Second, this might be the first time I’ve reviewed a book based solely on a hilarious edited version of the cover. I realize that “hilarious” is purely subjective, but it was this tweet

and some subsequent discussion of just how good that alien design was that got me thinking I might as well track down the original book and give it a read.

Praising the cover is the best thing I can do with this book now I’ve read it. It’s Ed Valigursky, according to the ISFDB.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but this is the most disappointed I’ve been about it: This book turned out to be the sequel to a book I didn’t like. And it’s not that the previous book was one I hated. It might have been entertaining to have a followup to something like that. No, the previous book in this series was boring and dull and regular old historytimes-sexist.

I realized what was happening near the beginning when something needed a footnote reference that read

See “Brigands of the Moon”, Ace Book, D—324

page 6

Even when I saw that, the reaction was “Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar.”

So I googled it and found my own blog. I re-read the review and even now I have no memory of writing it. I rarely drink and I don’t do drugs (more power to you if that’s your choice and you behave responsibly, though) so I think the only excuse I have for forgetting is that the book wasn’t memorable.

The sequel…is much the same. I’m struggling to remember a lot of what happened. I took at least three naps while reading it. Still, it was better than Brigands of the Moon.

The plot is a little better. While the first book was pirates trying to steal stuff on the moon while I yawned along, this book had alien invaders coming into the Solar System for mysterious reasons. Those reasons turned out to be both kind of clever and absolutely bananas, so credit where it’s due.

At first nobody even knows there are aliens. We learn as the book begins that there is a body entering the Solar System from interstellar space and that it behaves in some peculiar ways. This gets the attention of Gregg Haljan, the hero of the last book and one of the most useless protagonists the pulps ever gave us.

It’s refreshing, in a way. Whereas most pulp protags are so powerful and smart and charismatic that nothing could ever threaten to harm them, Gregg is a complete failure at everything. And it’s not that this is the story of a guy who is a failure. This isn’t satire. He’s written straight and I think we’re supposed to think he’s a special hero like all the rest, even though none of his actions bear this out.

At a certain point I’ll get to, I think Ray Cummings even realized it and cranked it on up so we can all hear it.

But before that, we get re-introduced to him and his pals. There’s Anita, Gregg’s girlfriend or fiancée or one of those things. Maybe the best word is “love interest.” Anyway, there are also Snap, an engineer, and his love interest, Venza, who is from Venus.

The jacket copy for this book—which wasn’t technically jacket copy because Ace Doubles don’t have back covers—really plays up how important the story is to Earth and Mars. Never once mentions Venus even though one of the main characters is from there and it’s just as advanced and important and threatened as the other two planets.

There are about two pages of “I bet this new planet is more than it seems” before Gregg and crew get a call from some military official that’s all THIS NEW PLANET IS MORE THAN IT SEEMS so Gregg and crew hop to action to do whatever they need to do to help. It turns out that Gregg is called on to do…not much. Which is fine because that’s all he ever does.

The real heroes of this book are the women. I’m not sure how intentional this is. Yes, they do most, if not all, of the dangerous work. But the previous book had some atrocious views on women, having no problem at all describing them as property and useful as baby factories. Besides that, this book doesn’t follow the women as they do all the important work. It follows Gregg and Snap, who sit around and worry until they spring to action, wreck the whole mission, and rescue the women even though they’ve given no indication that they need rescuing.

The women’s mission is to pump this Martian guy, Molo, for information. Some spy stuff at the beginning of this book shows that Molo and his sister Meka are in contact with the aliens that have freshly arrived in the Solar System. The mission was supposed to be Venza’s alone because of her Venusian wiles, but Anita comes along to protect her. Gregg and Snap also jump up to protect “their women” but are shot down.

I’m struggling to remember what order this plot takes place in. The pacing was so wacky. The book would go for several pages of people talking about whatever and then four things would happen. This novel was originally serialized, and I get the feeling that this is an artifact of that medium. There’s a fair chance that if I read this book in the chunks it was written to be read in, I wouldn’t feel so weird about it.

Gregg and Snap track down the women and the Martians but it turns out to be too late. A thing happens.

The Martians have put down some kind of device. Gregg and Snap are unable to stop them from starting it, surprise surprise, and…somehow…for some reason…the women and the Martians and Snap all disappear. I think that might be because the thing that happens is very bright and the Martians whisked them all away? Let’s run with that.

The thing is a gigantic solid impenetrable ray of light that reaches up into the sky and apparently extends to an infinite length. At the same time that it goes up on Earth, identical ones shoot out from Mars and Venus.

Now here’s where I was pleasantly surprised: My assumption was that these three beams were supposed to intersect and then something would happen. Probably a demon was summoned or somesuch. I was thinking of what a silly idea this was because the planets are not only moving in their orbits, they’re also spinning on their axes, so lining these things up would be a real feat of math and coincidence.

But I was wrong!

We learn later that these beams of solid light are in fact levers. The invading planet, which is named Wandl in case you didn’t figure that out already, shoots a similar one at them with the purpose of stopping the planet’s rotation. Furthermore, it can’t happen all at once, so Wandl shoots its beam for a few minutes each day, slowly reducing the rotational velocity of each planet and giving our heroes enough time to save the day.

To what end? Oh, this is the best part. This is the part I both love and hate. It’s a solidly original villain scheme that I’ve never seen elsewhere, but that might be because it’s also so stupid.

The people of Wandl (we never get a demonym for these people?) are stealing our planets. Once they’ve stopped their rotations, they’re going to hitch them up and haul them across interstellar space to their home system, to use as worlds for their own people.

Now, the book does address the fact that taking the planets away from the sun will kill all life on them. The Wandlites (weren’t those a thing from Animorphs?) are counting on that. They have to exterminate all the life before they can take them over, right? Of course.

THEN WHY DO IT AT ALL

Seriously, there’s no reason to haul these particular three planets across the stars for this purpose. If you’re going to sterilize them first, just grab some other planets that don’t already have life on them! What’s the deal!?!? There are plenty of them.

And what makes it even worse is that the Wandlsons are supposed to be brilliant. They’re stereotypical brain aliens. Sure, they have all this cool technology, so I guess that’s a point in their favor, but what are they doing with it? Why this decision? It makes no sense!

Whatever. Here’s the other part that’s great and makes me think that Ray Cummings was having a fine old time writing this stuff.

All of the military forces of the triplanet alliance (it’s not called that but what a cool name) are gathered to take on the Wandlsykeses. Gregg is given a ship. His first real command! See, in the previous novel he was the navigator of the Plantetara, which was destroyed near the end of the book. At least I think it was. This book says it was destroyed. That’s all I can honestly say I know.

Now he gets his own ship, the Cometara. Gregg meets his new crew, gets situated, thinks about how cool this new ship is, and plunges it into battle, where it is immediately destroyed.

I AM NOT KIDDING YOU HE’S IN SPACE FOR ALL OF TWO PAGES

Not only that, but Gregg is the single survivor. He is so incompetent and/or unlucky that he wastes the lives of some number of people I don’t remember. Some of them had names, though.

I still don’t think that the author meant to set up Gregg as such a useless schlub. What I think is going on here is that the author needs to set the stakes. There’s a thing you’ve probably heard of, “The Worf Effect.” It takes its name from how Star Trek: The Next Generation would have to show us a new hostile creature is a real threat, so the first thing it would do is take down Worf, the strongest member of the crew. It’s how we know that it just got real.

I think that’s what’s happening in this book, to some degree. We have to know that the situation is dangerous and the enemy is powerful. The author knows that a protagonist who just wins all the time undermines this, so he went in the extreme opposite direction. How intentional or conscious this is is a matter of debate and may be impossible to know for sure.

Also, does this make Gregg a schlemiel or a schlemazl? I’m gonna need you to weigh in.

I’d be curious to know if his other books work this way.

So after his ship gets blown up, Gregg floats around in space for a minute or two and is then captured by the Martians. He links back up with Snap, Anita, and Venza. He pretends to come over to the other side for a while, just long enough to get to Wandl proper. He learns a lot of things that I’m pretty sure the women already knew (they usually exist in dialogue just to confirm whatever Gregg just said), and figures out a way to stop the planet and also get back home safely.

The weird pacing of this story hits hardest as it’s ending. It’s a short novel, about 135 pages, and as those last twenty or so pages start to tick down, it looks like the book is just going to end before it resolves. But no, that doesn’t happen, because the book ends with a daring escape, a one-page interlude in a spooky forest, and Gregg finding the main control center of Wandl and just…shooting at it…

he shoots it enough that it stops working

and then they leave the planet by stealing a martian ship

the military forces of the other planets wipe out all of the other wandlers

and the planet wandl plunges into the sun

and that’s it

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN

wait I think I need to convey this better

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN

The book was still better than Brigands of the Moon. It had some original ideas and fewer lines of dialogue that denigrated women. Maybe none?

I found myself losing focus a lot. Part, but not all, of that was simple tiredness. This book did nothing to alleviate that tiredness. You know how sometimes you read a book late into the night despite being exhausted and you only realize it after you’re done? You’re just so transfixed? Wandl the Invader was the opposite of that. Midday and I’m sitting on the least comfortable chair I own and I still dozed off.

One very minor nitpick that I’ve seen happen elsewhere, but only started thinking about it here because it was, you know, anything but the book itself. It might be the pettiest peeve I’ve got!

It’s when the narration of the book makes reference to a time in its own future. This might be later in the book, or it might be after the book has ended.

A made-up example:

Later, when Steve looked back on this moment, he wondered why he hadn’t initiated the emergency Freedok procedures earlier.

You know what I’m talking about? It just bothers me. Rips me right out of the narrative. It’s not (just) that the author outright told us the character will survive the book, either. Stephen King is fond of this trick or ones like it.

On the other hand, let’s look at that previous paragraph about our favorite outer space ombudsman and zest it up a little, shall we?

Later, when Steve looked back on this moment, he wondered why he hadn’t initiated the emergency Freedok procedures earlier. It might have saved his life.

And boom goes the dynamite.

In conclusion, I don’t think I want to read any more Ray Cummings books and I hope I don’t accidentally do it again. I recognize that he was an early giant in the genre (one of the few big-names to predate Gernsback, I see here) and that he’s responsible for several things that would later become sci-fi staples, but I just don’t like the way he wrote. Then again, these two books are rather late in the game for him and are probably minor works. A lot of people online are suggesting the 1919 story “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” so maybe that’s worth a try.

This particular Ace Double’s other half is John Brunner’s I Speak for Earth, which looks interesting. That’ll probably be the next review.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch by David Bischoffbased on the screenplay written by Charlie HaasAvon Books, 1990Price I paid: 90¢

KEEP AWAY FROM BRIGHT LIGHT,

AWAY FROM WATER—

AND NEVER…NEVER…

FEED THEM AFTER MIDNIGHT!

Who would have thought that within every playful, cuddly Mogwai there lurked a gleefully, malevolent gremlin? Billy Peltzer and his girlfriend Kate Beringer found out the hard way—and it nearly destroyed their hometown of Kingston Falls. Now the young lovers have come to New York to seek their fortunes. But the towering, high-tech office building in which they work is about to become a breeding ground for a whole new batch of deliciously malicious creatures.

Start spreading the news. The gremlins—lots of them—have come to take Manhattan…and they’re itching to comically paint the Big Apple gremlin green!

Happy 2019 everybody! I hope it’s been a good one so far!

I’ve hinted broadly that I was planning on adding something new to the mix this year, and here it is. Movie novelizations.

This isn’t entirely new to the blog, considering that once I did a novelization of a Starsky and Hutch episode and Moon Zero Two turned out to be one although I didn’t know that at first, but I want to delve a little bit into why I want to tackle this strangest of genres, the movie tie-in novel.

I’m curious about some of the most basic aspects of this genre. I know what it’s for. It’s merchandise. It’s an attempt to make a few extra bucks on a movie. I get that. I also get that it’s an extremely cheap way of making those few extra bucks. I’m sure David Bischoff was paid forty dollars and the rest of a sandwich for his work. If an editor was hired, they weren’t paid enough to care. At one point in the novel it refers to “Gemlins,” if that gives you any idea of how much copyediting went into this process. The cover art was already done by the movie promo people. If you factor in printing costs, I’m sure this book cost about a thousand bucks to create and distribute.

I’m only sort of joking.

What I don’t know is who this book is for. Who buys these things? Clearly someone does or they wouldn’t be made in the first place. Wikipedia even claims that some novelizations do quite well.

Part of the answer to that question is “kids like me.” As a very little kid I read the children’s novelization of The Addams Family film about a hundred times, and later on I read all of the Star Trek film novelizations, plus a few of the episode novelizations (more like short-storyfications) by James Blish. Those things were so great. I hope they hold up.

The only Terry Brooks novel I’ve ever read is his novelization of Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace. It had a whole extra pod race scene!

But who was the novelization of Gremlins 2 written for? At times it comes across as really juvenile. I’m not throwing shade at kids’ or YA lit—they’re amazing—but their close cousin, the book written like children are stupid, is more similiar to what this book is.

But on the other hand, this book has cusses! It even says shit! Admittedly, it has fewer cusses than the Bible, but they’re still there. It also discusses adult feelings once or twice. Nothing too blue, but boobs (or rather, busts) are prominent.

So I don’t think this was written for kids.

One thing that’s clear is that the book was not only written on a tight budget, it was also written to a strict word count on a short deadline. Bischoff probably dashed this book off over a weekend. And that’s okay. I want to make it clear that I’m not condemning the author for this book. He needed to make a car payment, and I respect that.

Still, there are some turns of phrase and stylistic choices that are just wild.

A lot of my impetus for analyzing some novelizations comes from Ryan North’s page-by-page look at the novelization of Back to the Future. One connection here is that the BttF novelization was written by a fellow named George Gipe, who also wrote the novelization to the first Gremlins movie. That’s not relevant, but it’s neat.

I’m having trouble figuring out how is best to approach this review. Should I assume you’ve seen the movie and go from there? Should I summarize it? Golly, I probably should have figured that out before I got 700 words into the review, shouldn’t I…

So the most basic premise is that there are creatures called Mogwai. They are cute. Gizmo is one. The thing about Mogwai are that bright light kills them, they reproduce if they get wet, and they turn into monsters—the titular gremlins— if they eat after midnight.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s what we’ve all thought since we first saw the movie: What the hell does “after midnight” actually mean?

While the first movie was a straight-up dark comedy/horror, director Joe Dante decided to take the second movie into a different direction. It’s a screwball comedy, more in line with a Looney Tune than a horror movie. It’s crazy and zany and wacky and I love this movie.

Lots of people say it’s a satire of film sequels in general, but I’ll be honest, I don’t see that? That’s probably on me.

It’s also largely meta-referential. The movie (and the book) break down the fourth wall all over the place. For one example, a scene has several characters actually debating the mechanics of the “after midnight” thing. Questions like “what if it eats before midnight but gets a caraway seed stuck in its teeth that doesn’t come out until after” or “what if it crosses a time zone” are brought up. (Actually, the book refers to “the time zone,” which, I dunno, is pretty on-brand for it, as we’re about to see.)

Like a lot of movie tie-ins, I’m sure Gremlins 2 was written based on an early version of the script. There are scenes that didn’t take place in the film version, for example. Those might be scenes that got cut from the final product, but might also be inventions of the author. I don’t know how much creative control Bischoff had.

It was also written before some characters had been cast. It’s hard to tell when sometimes. The main characters had been cast already, surely, since they were holdovers from the previous movie. But new characters were less clear. Oddly, they were also the ones described in more detail. I suppose we were expected to know what and who Billy Peltzer and Kate Beringer looked like (Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates, respectively).

Real-estate mogul Daniel Clamp, Billy and Kate’s boss, is described as looking like a “greedy Jimmy Stewart,” which is pretty different from (the incredible) John Glover. Likewise, the screenplay hadn’t settled on what Clamp’s personality was supposed to be when Bischoff got it, and it looks like some re-writer made the right choice. Instead of a greedy, evil billionaire, the movie made him more of a exuberantly clueless sort. I liked it.

Likewise, while the film was able to use visuals to make it clear that he was a parody of Donald Trump and Ted Turner, the book had to come right out and say it by comparing him to both of them. Repeatedly. Just in case we missed it.

On the flip, its clear that one new character was cast already, or at least they knew who they wanted. When we’re introduced to Dr. Catheter, the geneticist whose work becomes a driver for a lot of the wacky horror, he’s described as

…a tall man whose narrow features and crooked teeth made him look very much like the Dracula of Hammer horror films.

page 55

If you haven’t seen the movie, it may not surprise you to learn that the character was played by Christopher Lee.

A nice touch that I don’t remember from the movie, the book refers to him as “Dr. Cushing Catheter,” which is an unwieldy name but at least a sweet reference to Lee’s good friend and Hammer colleague Peter Cushing.

Dammit, I’m about to go on a Hammer binge, aren’t I? Jesus god and holy spirit I love those movies.

I could keep going on about how the book deviates from the film—there’s a lot of things I feel are worth mentioning—but that would turn into the whole review and I’m not sure that should be the point of writing it. There is one last thing, though.

Here and there we get the story from Gizmo’s point of view. It’s really bad because the written-for-dumb-children knob gets turned up and broken off, but it’s even more weird. It’s not necessarily weird that Gizmo is more intelligent than his movie representation would have us believe. He’s intelligent, and the movie makes his emotions and thoughts clear with a puppet or whatever he was, but we don’t see any of his inner life. Learning that he has one isn’t terribly surprising.

Still, his thoughts make reference to the weirdest stuff. On page 8 he thinks of Sylvester Stallone (he’s watching a Rambo movie) as looking like “Paul McCartney on steroids.” Not weird enough? Later on, after the evil Mogwai are created, Gizmo is the one to name them. He names two of them George and Lenny, because they remind him of the Steinbeck novel.

Are we to believe that Gizmo has read Of Mice and Men? I have trouble imagining that. But this book specifically refers to the book, not the movie, so there we are.

Now, in the movie it’s clear that those two Mogwai/Gremlins are based on the characters and are named such in the script, and I get that Bischoff had to make that clear (or did he?), but it’s still weird how he chose to do it. Couldn’t one of the other characters made the observation?

The other thing is a random line, also from near the beginning:

It reminded him of the Light and Lava Falls of the homeworld of the Mogturmen, the inventors of the Mogwai.

pg 9

WHAT

Never, ever in the movies do we get any kind of origin of the Mogwai. I don’t have a lot of really strong feelings on storytelling, but one I do have is that if you’re going for horror, things are scarier if you don’t know where they came from. If they just are. Once some of the mystery starts to fall away, the things get more familiar and understandable, and that undermines the scarier elements. I recognize that this is subjective and of course you can argue with me, but I stand by it.

My research shows that in the novelization for the first Gremlins, George Gipe had a long origin story included, and that Bischoff is referencing that. I don’t know if that story was new to him or if it was cut from the screenplay, but if that’s the case, then damn, right call.

Okay, so the main question about this novelization still stands: Who is it for? Who was the expected audience?

I get that for some movies, the novelization is a way of getting deeper into the film’s universe. The characters’ inner thoughts can be explored and we can get more exposition on things. That’s why I read a lot of the Star Trek stuff as a kid.

Did people feel that way about Gremlins 2? I kind of doubt it. Of course, the film series was heavily merchandised. You probably remember the Gizmo with suction cups thing in every third car on the interstate. (That gets referenced in Gremlins 2, by the way). So it’s no surprise that a novelization is part of that merch effort.

This is a movie based heavily on sight gags, pratfalls, and slapstick. It loses so much when it’s turned into prose.

There’s one scene—and I realize this is turning into another “here’s a difference bit” but hear me out please—in the movie where the fourth wall just collapses. It’s great. The gremlins go so crazy that the film breaks and we cut to a movie theater where people are watching this very movie. Hulk Hogan shows up. I love it.

I was wondering very much how the book would treat that. Turns out, the author does a great job. It’s the only good part of the book, to be frank.

See, instead of the film breaking, Bischoff introduces himself as a character getting pushed away from his typewriter by the Brain Gremlin, who goes on a long rant about, well, a lot of things. It’s insane and it’s utterly perfect. It even references the Church of the SubGenius? For this two pages, I have a ton of respect for the author, who manages to get himself out of the bathroom and resume the book.

Everything else is so bad though. This book reads like it was written for dumb children, but it also has cusses. I think I mentioned that already. There are a lot of bad turns of phrase, some of which emphasize the fact that Bischoff was paid by the word.

“Well, uhm,” Billy said. Time to desperately dissemble!

pg 139

“…But how do you know so much about them.” (sic)

“I…er…I read science fiction and fantasy!”

pg 143

The Gremlin grinned evilly. But then his expression changed. He looked like a comic’s parody of a drunk who has just taken a shot of very strong liquor.

pg 145

This book also hated question marks and whenever italics were called for, it used ALL CAPS. It uses so many words.

This was, with that one exception, a really stupid book.

Again, I’m not calling out Bischoff for that. He had a job to do and I think he did it magnificently.

But there are also references that made me go whaaaaaat. Near the end he draws a comparison to the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Curious Case of M. Valdemar.”

Oh god I just looked it up: That’s not the name of the story! Bischoff! What are you doing?!?

The story’s title is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

He does this several times! Once we’re told about something called RIDE OF THE VALKRIE and another time it’s THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER WHO COULD but I didn’t realize that he did it with the Poe story. What else did he screw up?

I’m still not calling out the author. These are understandable mistakes, especially if you have three hours to hammer out 60k words and nobody hired an editor to catch that kind of thing. I’m calling out the entire Hollywood merchandising machine for foisting this halfassed crap on us.

But that’s nothing new.

Who was supposed to read this book? My working theory is this:

Nobody.

Nobody was supposed to read this book. People were supposed to buy it and not read it. Put it on the shelves next to the Gizmo doll and, I dunno, some action figures or whatever. Never, ever crack it open. It’s not a book, it’s a piece of merch that looks like a book.

At least the author got paid for something that wasn’t very difficult and at one point he got to have a little fun with it. That’s all anybody could ask.

If you’re worried that I’m switching this blog entirely to reviewing movie novelizations, don’t worry. I’ll just pepper them here and there. I did think about starting a sister blog for them, and might still do so, but that seems like a lot of work. In case you’re wondering, I did re-watch the movie—both movies, in fact—before starting the novel, so that was interesting. I intend to keep that up, too, especially considering I’ve picked up a few novelizations for movies that I know only from reputation.

Or should I not watch those movies, and review the book based on its own merits? Hmm…an interesting question. Your thoughts?

The varied answers to that question have proved to be fertile ground for some of the greatest science fiction imaginations. But perhaps we shouldn’t look too closely into the future of cybernetics. It may be that the survival capacity of the thinking machine is greater than that of its maker…

I’ve invented a new dance called the Philip K. Dick, and it goes a little something like this:

You find somebody whom you find interesting

Hands on your hips, do a little waltz step

Hands in the air/just don’t care

Wiggle wiggle wiggle

Butts gotta touch here. Gotta.

Mashed potato

Finish, curtsy/bow

Sit down and wonder for the rest of your life whether the dance actually happened or was a figment of your imagination

possibly implanted by a malign agent or oh god what if it’s a benign agent either way does it even matter

like are you even you anymore

what can you trust

not your own brain that’s for damn sure

drugs

So I’m finishing out 2018 with a Phil Dick short story. I just…feel like it’s appropriate? To be fair, it’s probably an appropriate way to finish out any year, but this is the year that I thought of it, so there.

Oh god, did I think of it or did somebody put the thought in my mind and also the memory of coming up with the thought

We’re living in an age where the line between truth and belief is becoming increasingly blurry. Or are we? I’m in the camp that says we’ve always been like this and we’re just becoming more aware of it due to circumstances, but the end result is the same and it’s a good opportunity for us all to do better.

A gateway to understanding that blurry line is Philip K. Dick.

I take that back. Dick isn’t a gateway to understanding that line, but rather a gateway to becoming more aware of it. He never—to the best of my knowledge—offered up any answers.

Or if he did they’ve been wiped from my memory ohhhhhhh jesus

I guess for the sake of context I ought to tell you what this story is about. It’s a pretty archetypal Phil Dick one:

There’s this fellow named Olham. He works for the government and he’s thinking about taking a vacation because he’s so burned out. He seems to have a pretty decent life, despite the fact that there’s a war on.

The war is with some aliens called Outspacers. They’re from Alpha Centauri. We never see or hear or learn very much about them except that their ships are better than ours. The war is currently at a stalemate. Despite the Outspacers’ naval superiority, Earth has constructed a planetary shield (a protec-bubble, by Westinghouse) that is invulnerable. Earth just needs a way to wipe out the Outspacers once and for all and they can claim victory. Of course, it works the other way ’round, too.

Olham finishes his breakfast one morning and heads off to work. He’s met by a friend of his, Nelson, and a stranger, military guy named Major Peters.

After some pleasant conversation, Peters announces that he’s here to arrest Olham for being an enemy agent. A robot spy that killed and replaced the real Olham. Moreover, the robot thinks it’s the real Olham. Has all his memories and everything.

The robot also has a bomb in it, and it’s set to explode. No one knows what will trigger the bomb, although speculation is that it’s a spoken phrase.

From, like, the title I knew what I was getting into with this story. Like I said, it’s archetypal. I don’t say that as criticism, just as fact. Dick was concerned with a lot of things repeatedly in his writing, and one of those things was personal identity. It also happens to be the thing that attracts me most to his writing, and in turn causes me a lot of anxiety while I’m lying in bed at night trying to sleep.

Or I’m asleep and dreaming that I’m lying in bed trying to sleep

A long time ago I read James H. Schmitz’s The Universe Against Her and found myself very angry—perhaps irrationally so—at the psychic protagonist’s use of her powers to modify people’s memories and personalities to suit her whims and convenience. I stand by that anger and believe that stories like this one are the reason why.

It’s possible that that book, the memory of reading it, and the review are all figments of my imagination. Sure, I can check that the review is there, and I’m pretty sure it is, but can I even trust memories of five seconds ago?

Apart from the issues of continuity of memory and personality and perhaps even the existence of a soul, this story tackles at least one other issue, and it’s not one I was expecting. “Impostor” is also concerned with the issue of enemy infiltration and due process.

The Red Scare was in full swing when Dick wrote this story in 1953.

Olham is never put on trial, never questioned, never examined. He is simply captured and then taken around to the back of the Moon to be shot. And that’s bad.

But we also know that the government people think that there’s a good chance that robot-Olham is extremely dangerous. It’s never revealed where they got their information, but they know—or at least think they know—that wasting even a single moment in disposing of this robo-spy might cost lives. So are they justified?

The ending leaves that question up in the air. See, Olham escapes the clutches of the government agents and goes to find proof that he’s the real thing. Early in the story there was a breakfast-table mention of some woods that caught fire some time previously. Olham realizes that this is probably where the robot crashed, and goes to that place to prove his innocence.

The crashed space ship is there. The government agents find him there, and he explains how this was all such a big mistake. Not only is the spaceship here, he explains, but look there at that body! It’s the alien robot thing!

And look at that piece of metal in its chest! Clearly that’s the bomb!

While one of the government guys is busy apologizing to Olham for the whole mixup, another one goes over to the body and examines it. The piece of metal in the chest turns out not to be the bomb, but instead is a knife. The body is the real Olham.

What I didn’t expect from this story was the ending. I’m gonna just quote it.

“But if that’s Olham, then I must be—”

He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

THE THING THAT TRIGGERED THE BOMB WAS THE REALIZATION THAT HE WAS THE ROBOT ALL ALONG

O

M

G

I love it so much.

If the government guys had followed the law and given Olham/”Olham” due process, would that ending have happened at all? Or would it have happened earlier? Obviously there’s no real answer, but it’s fun to speculate.

I’ve read other Phil Dick before, as you probably guessed, but this story was a new one to me. It’s one of his earlier ones, so it might be the first one where he suggested a copy of a person with all that person’s memories and all that jazz. A lot of my Dick reading is his later stuff.

To be honest, I think I like this story more than some of his novels. Maybe I like his stories better than his novels all around. I’m not throwing any shade, but I like how compact this little tale was. It got its job done rapidly and let me get on with stressing about what it all means.

This is purely subjective, but as much as I love his novels, I can get bogged down by them. Like, four or five simultaneous narratives going on at once, one of which is written in I-Ching, sure, I get it. I appreciate it. It’s just that I have trouble keeping it all straight after a bit. That’s my failing.

Although I guess it’s pretty on-brand for me and Philip K. Dick to spend an evening reading VALIS until I doze off on the recliner and then wake up to find that all along I was reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said without realizing it.

You know what else is pretty on-brand Dick? The title of this story is “Impostor” everywhere but here:

It’s “Impostor” on the table of contents, and it’s “Impostor” on every reference on every website, but on the title page of the short story in this comp, it’s spelled wrong.

Because I’m an anxious and highly-suggestible person—probably the Phil Dick target audience in a nutshell—this caused me an irrational amount of trouble.

In the end, if you’ve read some other Philip K. Dick but not this one, you aren’t missing out on much. It’s a fantastic punchline but I already spoiled that for you.

On the flip side, if you’re looking to get some Dick but don’t know where to start, you could do worse than to get a collection of short stories with this one in it.

I see that there was a 2002 film based on this story, and while it has a great cast (Gary Sinise and Vincent D’Onofrio? Be still my heart), it looks like nobody liked it. I’m still going to look it up. I will take this one for the team.

Wrapping up my fifth year of book blogging, all I can say is jeeeeeeeeeezus.

Thank you all so much for reading. I’m looking to stay the course for 2019, and I’ve also got plans to add some new and interesting stuff along the way. Nothing too drastic, and I think you’ll like it. Or you won’t and I’ll never mention it again. Either way, we all win.

Have a wonderful New Year, everybody. Take care of yourselves.

oh no what if 2019 already happened and our memories of it were erased and we’re convinced that it’s only now about to start oh no

]]>https://schlock-value.com/2018/12/30/impostor/feed/2timalmightyI’ll Be Back Next Weekhttps://schlock-value.com/2018/12/23/ill-be-back-next-week/
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Hey all, I know that I’m a giant bummer joykiller, but I’m gonna be on the road for the holidays and I don’t really have the time to present you with a proper post this week, so I’m coppin’ out and throwin’ the whole schedule out of whack.

Just so you didn’t come all this way for nothing, here are some micro-reviews of stuff I’ve read this year:

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn Tempest (2018)

I’m only a few chapters in, but already I think I’m really going to like this biography. My mind has wandered a few times while reading it, but that’s not the author’s fault, because the book is both engaging and enlightening. You can probably tell that I got onto a big Rome kick after reading Casca. This is scratching that itch very well.

Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock by Stephen Hyden (2018)

I’m not gonna toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty big classic rock buff. It’s my dad’s fault. That said, this book of essays blew me out of the water with stuff I didn’t know already. It’s also really funny. Stephen Hyden is now on my short list of authors I get notifications about.

I liked this book so much I got a copy for my brother’s Christmas present. I’m sure he’s never ever once read this blog, so I’m not spoiling anything, although I can now guarantee that he’s going to get a wild hair to see what I’m writing about.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North (2018)

Without question, my book of the year. I love this book so much.

I mean, it’s Ryan North, so you know it’s going to be both funny and informative. That comes with the name. What’s crazy is just how practical this book is. Sure, I’m not likely to need how to build a plow from scratch any time soon (but if I need to, I know where to find out how), but since reading this book I’ve learned how to make my own butter, and I appreciate that.

Seriously, this book is worth your money. I’m being told that the Kindle edition has issues, which is annoying because I seriously bought Kindle copies for more than one friend this Christmas. Frown emoji.

So yeah, I hope you all have a merry and happy and wonderful and safe holiday season, where and if applicable. I’ll see you next week.

When they flew Casey into the hospital at Nha Trang, the medics were sure he’d die. That he didn’t was only the first surprise.

The second, bigger one, was that Casey had been fighting for two thousand years, ever since that day on Golgotha when he put his lance into the side of the Man on the Cross.

“Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again.”

So does Casca’s journey begin, a man who cannot die, does not age, and knows no skill but those of battle. He becomes The Eternal Mercenary.

copied from Goodreads

There’s a lot to talk about in today’s review, and before any of that I want to thank Hannah, who brought this series of books to my attention. She deserves special thanks because these books are the epitome of what this blog is all about.

Oh golly where do I even start

I got the ebook version of this novel and read it on my Kindle. The entire series, minus a few volumes that have been purged from the canon, is available this way. If you use Kindle Unlimited you can even read them that way. I don’t subscribe to that service, so I didn’t have that option. Nevertheless, I was excited enough by the entire premise of this novel that I forked up the ten bucks. I don’t regret it.

I bring this up for some full disclosure:

The cover image presented up there is not the cover image for the Kindle edition. The ebook version is similar, but worse and I couldn’t find a decent-rez version of it.

Because it was an ebook it didn’t have a back jacket, obviously, so I copied what appears to be the jacket copy for the original edition from Goodreads. If anybody happens to know that this is in fact not the correct jacket copy, please let me know and I will correct.

A third, unrelated disclosure:

WordPress has this new post editor, and I like it, but it might mean that the usual format of my blog posts is altered a bit while I figure out how to duplicate the original one. On the flip side, I’m taking it as an opportunity to goof around a bit.

Okay, let’s begin.

The Author

If you’re anything like me, the author’s name tickled something in the back of your head. The man’s name is Barry Sadler, but it didn’t click for me until I saw it formatted as SSgt. Barry Sadler, and I’ve had a certain song stuck in my head for at least a week now…

Fighting soldiers from the skyFearless men who jump and die

Yep, it’s the same guy! “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was a hit in 1966—one of the very few pro-military hits of that era—and then by 1979 Sadler had decided to write a series of books. In between he released some other music but none of it reached the same level as “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” He also appeared on TV a few times.

He also killed a man by shooting him in the head, after which he tried to plant a gun in the guy’s vehicle. It was ruled voluntary manslaughter and Sadler served about a month in the county workhouse. The guy had been harassing Sadler and his ladyfriend, with whom he had been previously involved.

Between this incident and the end of his life in 1989 after a mysterious gunshot to his own head, a subsequent coma, and a series of fierce court battles, Sadler had a tragic life, but he also did some good in the world by providing free medical services to remote villages in Guatemala (Sadler was a medic in the Green Berets himself).

Tragedy aside, Sadler’s military experience makes this series of books a bit more complex and fascinating. I’ll get to the details in a minute, but long story short, these books are 70s pulp man-fantasy, and they’re about war. Lots of the man-fantasy series I’ve read have characters that served in the military (usually Vietnam) and have brought those skills back to civilian life to be vigilantes, and there’s always that strict pro-military bent to the genre. Casca, though, is the only one of these—that I know of—written by someone with real first-hand experience of war.

The Series

The premise of this series is the absolute best. It’s like they were written just for me.

Our main character is Casca Rufio Longinus. He is the soldier that, according to John 19:34, stabbed Jesus in the side with his spear as he was suspended from the cross. In real life there are legends about just such a figure, who is sometimes conflated with the Wandering Jew legend.

Casca is rendered immortal as punishment. Specifically, he is condemned to wander the Earth as a soldier until Jesus comes back. The book does not explore the theological implications of this.

So what we get is a series of books featuring Casca’s involvement in all of human history, although I presume mainly the parts that are war. But I repeat myself.

Looking at the series beyond #1, it looks like Casca gets into some wacky adventures. Hell, by #2 he’s in Mexico in the 3rd century and I’m sure it’s very tasteful. I’m seeing summaries for books where he’s at Agincourt, hanging with the Khans, and fighting for the Confederacy.

Sadler wrote the first twenty-two novels in the series. After he died, the series was picked up by several authors and apparently there’s some scandal regarding all that. Two of the books were plagiarized from other sources and dropped from canon!

The series is currently being written by Tony Roberts. He just put out #49: The Lombard.

The Book

This book is wild and crazy, kids.

It’s clear that it was written as a setup to the rest of the series, so the wartime action isn’t as prominent as I’m sure it gets later. I might be wrong! I look forward to finding out.

There was still plenty of war, though.

It starts out in Vietnam in 1970. Specifically it starts at a Field Hospital in Nha Trang. It’s here that we meet Dr. Julius Goldman, a doctor.

He’s busy patching people up after a particularly gruesome ambush when he comes across a soldier identified as Casey Romain. The soldier ought to be dead. He was hit by a mortar and his head is all but destroyed. Brain is exposed. Yet he remains alive.

As the doctor watches, the wound starts to stitch together.

Further investigation reveals a spearhead embedded in one of the soldier’s thighs. Dr. Goldman removes it and examines it. He determines that it is very old.

The soldier starts muttering in his sleep, which Dr. Goldman recognizes as

Not the Latin of the textbooks. Casey was speaking the Latin of the Caesars. Perfectly. Fluently.

I should add that while many sections of this book were well-enough researched, Sadler gave no heed to the linguistic concerns of this book. “The Caesars” were likely speaking Greek, for one thing.

Anyway, based on this evidence, Dr. Goldman jumps to the conclusion that he’s dealing with the immortal Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus Christ in the side. It takes him like ten minutes.

At first I was all “this is ridiculous” but you know, it occurs to me that it kind of makes sense within the fiction of the novel. If Casca legit exists and has been walking around for two millennia, the legend is probably a little more solid than the Longinus legend from our own reality. Looking around at the series summary shows that in later books we find out that there are whole factions of people who have emerged to promote or hinder Casca for some reasons, so yeah, I’m willing to give the book a pass on this.

Dr. Goldman goes to check on “Casey,” who tells the doctor that he is who he thinks he is, and then reveals his story via some kind of telepathy. Honestly, that was the weirdest part of the book. Nothing anywhere else suggests that Casca has telepathic powers, or even that telepathic powers exist in this story. The story could just as easily have been conveyed by handing the doctor a manuscript or just sitting around and talking for a while.

I mentioned that I read the Kindle edition of this book, and I want to bring it up again to say that it had a lot of formatting problems. I think it was yet another OCR hack job with no proofreading. This makes it hard for me to criticize the book in terms of style and grammar, but I’m going to land on the side of dodgy.

Oddly, a lot of those problems smooth out as the book progresses, although punctuation and letter switching remain a problem throughout. That can easily be explained by the aforementioned OCR problems, but I don’t know just how much of that blame can be laid on technology and laziness.

And yet, while the book was not what anyone would call well-written, it did manage to convey a sense of urgency and excitement that really worked in its favor. I honestly enjoyed large swathes of this novel, but there are some major caveats.

Straight up we are transported to Roman Jerusalem, where Casca is stationed as a soldier. We get to see the part we all came for, where Jesus gets crucified and then tells Casca that he will “remain as you are until we meet again” or something like that. Casca doesn’t think anything of it at first, just putting it all down to an already crazy man driven further crazy by pain and exhaustion. Jesus dies and Casca goes about his business.

Easily the best part of this book is following Casca through his life as a Roman legionary. Sadler manages to convey an easy fluency with military life that obviously makes a lot of sense considering his own background. What he manages to do, though, is to put it into modern military lingo. Casca has a “Sarge,” for instance. There’s a lot of stuff like that. Sadler also used real Roman military terms to describe things, too, and it doesn’t get overly explanatory or bogged down. It really, honestly works.

This is almost blasphemy, but it reminded me a lot of the anachronistic language in The Once and Future King, which ranks among my top three books.

I’m not a classicist, but I’ve read some Mary Beard. A decent bit of Sadler’s depiction of Rome checks out okay. He avoids some of the major tropes and pitfalls, although he does refer to a vomitorium as a place to go puke so you can eat some more, so at least one major misconception made it in.

(A vomitorium is the passage in a large stadium or arena from which the crowd enters and leaves.)

One thing I liked is how diverse the Roman military is depicted as having been. Casca runs around with Gauls, Germans, and Syrians, among others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

Casca has been diddling his Sarge’s lady, and the issue comes to a head when the Sarge finds out and attacks him. Casca gets stabbed in the gut, but he also kills the Sarge. This is the point when Casca realizes that Jesus wasn’t just talking crazy. The wound heals up overnight.

Casca is put on trial for murdering a superior officer, booted from the Legion, and spends the next thirty years underground as a slave in a mine.

Another thing I liked: Casca, despite being immortal, still has things to fear. He makes the realization himself, and it’s a chilling thought. He can’t die, but he can still suffer. He still feels hunger and thirst. He still feels pain. Now, one might argue that these sensations take on a different meaning when you know for certain that you can’t die of them, but there are other things to consider. Casca himself considers the fact that if the mine collapses with him in it, he would be trapped in there forever. Or maybe Jesus would come down there and find him so he can die, but that’s cold comfort.

So Casca is an immortal, but the story still has stakes. There’s a lot to like about this book. So far that’s all I’ve talked about.

Now let’s talk about why this book is godawful.

Women

There are hardly any women in this book at all. What few there are are treated horribly. Now, on one hand this might be attributed to the setting, but not all of it. Domestic abuse is treated like a joke at a few points. There are several instances of sex workers being abused or killed, some of which lead us to the issue of

Race

This book features an African man and an Asian man, and neither of them are treated well.

The African, Jubala, is a gladiator. After Casca escapes the mines, he is sold to the same gladiator school as Jubala, who is the star. Casca quickly rises in popularity after a series of victories, and Jubala becomes jealous. That part is fine.

Jubala is characterized with a degree of racism that can only be described as Weird Tales-ian. Ripped straight from the African tales of Robert E. Howard, this man is referred to as barbarous with primitive and evil gods. He sexually assaults and kills both men and women as sacrifices to his gods. He and Casca finally come to fight in the gladiatorial arena, where Casca defeats him with Kung Fu.

Yep. This was almost rad.

See, there’s the Asian of the story, Shiu Lao Tze. Casca meets him earlier in the story than the whole Jubala bit, and he’s a different set of stereotypes. He’s the standard wise(cracking) old Asian man, usually referred to as “Little Father” or the like. He probably has a long wispy beard but I don’t think it was mentioned. He’s Chinese, but he’s also pan-Asian.

He’s a Confucian, but he also knows Kung Fu and quotes the Buddha. I’m unsure of how to interpret this. Either it’s a realistic view of an open-minded person who seeks wisdom from all sources, one who is familiar with traditions outside his own, or it’s “Asians all believe the same stuff.”

The worries me because Sadler served in, you know, Vietnam.

Shiu is treated sympathetically, unlike Jubala. We’re meant to like him. But he’s also a tasteless stereotype. He reminded me a lot of Chiun from The Destroyer, which makes sense considering that they’re being pulled from the same well.

On the flip side, he does teach Casca how to use Kung Fu, so we get to see him use it as a gladiator, which, again, is pretty rad. It’s just a shame that this bit of awesomeness is surrounded on all sides by the inexcusable.

To Conclude

The story ends with Casca earning his freedom by winning in the arena harder than anyone else. He promptly loses that freedom by getting roaring drunk and insulting Nero in public. He’s assigned as a galley slave on a ship, which sinks after four emperors come and go. He wakes up on a beach and rejoins the army, fights against the Parthians, and goes crazy for a while. He makes a pretty good point when he screams at Jesus for the cruelty of this punishment, stating that his followers say he’s a God of love but he’s doing a good job of proving them wrong.

We cut back to Dr. Goldman, who is unsure of what to do with this information he’s been given.

And then we cut to the Sinai Peninsula, modern day, where a mysterious man named Casey is working with the Israeli army, occasionally dropping obscure mentions of how he once served here a long time ago…

I know it’s a sign of my white dude privilege that I enjoyed this book so much, but dammit, I really enjoyed this book. For what it’s worth, I also hated large parts of it. If it could have had less flippant misogyny and sickening racism, it would have been a book that I’d recommend you read.

It had so many good points. It read like it was written by a highly enthusiastic amateur, which might put some people off, but I got carried away by that enthusiasm. Some parts were cartoonishly violent. But a lot of it had a breezy sort of tone that worked really well. A favorite line from near the beginning:

It was not what Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea, would call your best quality day.

or this long one near the middle

He gave the wounded man one dirty look and dropped back off to sleep, oblivious of the new set of oversexed body lice that had just copulated their way up the long journey from his unwashed feet along the calves of his stringy, hairy legs and into the curly, matted hair of his pubic region, there to join a number of their relatives—including a few diehard fleas who would have rather been on a decent dog.

[sic]s abound

And Casca is basically a decent guy. Even before this book is over he stops looking at war as a glorious thing and instead begins to see it for the atrocity it is. But he’s cursed to be a soldier until Jesus comes back, so he’s going to have to deal with it.

Looking through the synopses of this series, there do not appear to be any stories of Casca in, say, 2050. Or 2100. 2525 (if man is still alive).

Hedging our bets, authors?

The book wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was plenty enjoyable. I’ll probably read later books in the series, mostly to see if they manage to do away with the most offensive parts of this book. And I’m curious to see how later authors do with that. I feel like it could only improve.

One of the most notable things is how the book manages to toe the line between glorifying the military and showing it warts and all. This isn’t just the Roman Legion. There’s an odd-as-hell mention of a guy in the frame story who is selling Army medical supplies on the black market. We just learn about it as the point of view flits through his mind for a moment.

I mean, it’s clear that the singer of “The Ballad of the Green Berets” is gonna be pretty pro-military, but at the same time, this wasn’t the kind of polished and fawning you’d expect from someone who never served. Sadler probably had a pro-military agenda, but he at least knew what he was talking about. And perhaps we can disconnect a pro-military agenda from a pro-war agenda? I don’t see the latter here.

Though basically a skeptic, William Reynolds had known out-of-body experiences in the past. But never before had he floated past the boundaries of Baltimore…and across the borders of time. And now, with the fires of Civil War looming on the horizon, the astonished graduate student was hobnobbing with none other than the dark poet Edgar Allen Poe. But their meeting of minds was to have chilling consequences. For a desperate Confederacy planned to use them both to remold the world—and to change history…for the worse.

Hoooooo golly.

Where do we even start?

Everything about the cover and presentation of this book makes it scream Shannon Tweed movie. Softcore Cinemax porn circa 1990—which is appropriate because that’s the year the book came out. It’s a product of its time.

Let’s focus on the font choice. Specifically the word “lurid.” For one, who the hell uses the word “lurid” except for people trying to sound vaguely sexy and the people who protest their existence? But that font. I swear. Anybody know what it’s called? I feel like I’ve seen it before..but where? Oh, but where…it sits at the back of my mind, waiting to come out…

Got it!

Oh wow, Wikipedia rabbit hole. I didn’t realize that show was created by Stephen J. Cannell? And it ran for eight years? Jeez Louise.

So yeah, someone tell me what that font is called so I can change this blog to it.

Between title, sexy font, and Dorian Vallejo cover art that didn’t quite survive the scanning process (sorry? It was very glossy), I guess we’re all quite justified in thinking this book is about Sexy Times. Perhaps in dreams. What could it be? Could it involve people using dreams to have sex? Maybe they get caught up in a web of mystery and intrigue that can only be solved by more dream sex?

No. None of that happens. Not a single thing. You know what does happen? Time travel. Out-of-body experiences. Astral projection. Card psi. Edgar Allan Poe. Complaining about graduate school.

It’s bananas.

It’s also by Charles L. Harness, whose name didn’t even ring a bell until I was doing research. Yeah, I’ve read him before. Yeah, that book was 1953’s The Rose, a book widely regarded as seminal to the New Wave movement. A book I rather liked for its interesting premise of Science vs. Art, even though I didn’t agree with it. A meditation on creation, written poetically and sometimes transcendentally.

And so it turned out that Lurid Dreams was largely in that same camp! It’s weird! This book is not at all what I expected!

Our main character is William Reynolds. I don’t know what the back of the book means by saying that he’s “basically a skeptic,” because that never comes up. Surprise, surprise, the back of the book is full of lies. What he is, though, is a psychic. Specifically, he’s got two psychic powers: he’s a card psi, meaning he can mentally read cards or something, and he can astrally project. The book called it out-of-body, or OB, most of the time. He’s particularly good at it.

This book has an interesting take on psychic powers. Namely, everybody takes them for granted. The world beyond the immediate plot isn’t elaborated on very much, but one thing we do know is that casinos have special detectors to make sure that psychics, especially card psi people like William Reynolds, aren’t playing the system.

Reynolds is a graduate student. His thesis is on the topic of OB. Remember how I said that everybody in the book takes the paranormal for granted? Well, it turns out that there’s one person who doesn’t. It’s crusty old Dean Garten! And, of course, Dean Garten is critical to Reynolds’s thesis committee and, therefore, his doctorate.

A lot of this book, a lot a lot a lot of it, focuses on being a graduate student. Now, I didn’t go beyond my Bachelor’s for a number of reasons, but I have a lot of friends who decided to go on further, and so a lot of this book rings true. It represents graduate school as a constant hellscape of stress, exhaustion, anger, fear, and poverty.

Hey, Academia? Maybe lay off a little bit. Convincing people that destroying their physical and mental health in the name of that piece of paper is a pretty shitty thing to do.

William has a girlfriend, Alix, who is also a graduate student. Her thesis is about Freudian symbology in the world of Edgar Allan Poe. She’s got problems of her own, including a member of her thesis committee who has bluntly stated that he will not vote yes on her thesis unless she sleeps with him. Still, the two of them manage to survive with a lot of mutual support. It’s one of the healthier relationships I’ve ever read in a blog book.

The book opens with William conducting an experiment for, among other people, the crusty old Dean. He’s going to do an OB, float up to a high shelf, and find a note with a number on it. He’ll read that note, come back down, wake up, and recite the number. Easy peezy. He does so, and also takes a moment to astrally wander around the location for a bit. He notices two people he doesn’t recognize, and they both seem to be interested in the experiment. More importantly, one of those people seems to acknowledge his presence, despite being, you know, invisible and stuff.

He wakes up and everything starts to go to hell. He announces the number on the card, thirteen, and his graduate adviser tells him no, that’s wrong. The mean old Dean crows about how this is all a hoax and now he’s got the proof, hooray hooray. William is confused. He goes and fetches the paper and it very definitely says thirteen. His advisor, Dr. Loesser, says that that isn’t the number he wrote, though. Everybody gets really confused, and for some reason I didn’t quite catch, this just convinces the Dean even more that this is all baloney, so he cuts off all the money. Dr. Loesser resigns and moves to some other college. William is destitute.

That is, until he’s introduced to a fella named Colonel Birch. Birch represents a non-profit organization called The Confederate States of America.

Yeah

He’s got a proposal, and…it doesn’t make a lot of sense. He’ll fund William’s graduate thesis if William does one thing. All he has to do is go back in time and convince Edgar Allan Poe to join the army instead of becoming a poet.

So much of this book only works in a sort of dream logic. There are wild leaps of faith, crazy assumptions, and people running along with the most bizarre conclusions based on all that. Sure, that kind of makes sense in a book called Lurid Dreams, even though that title doesn’t fit at all, but here’s the craziest thing: I was generally fine with it.

I don’t know how else to describe it other than the idea that I got caught up in the flow of this book. The Rose did the same thing. I was immersed, and while sometimes I might poke my head up at an odd or interesting concept, I mostly just kept it buried in the narrative. Like a dream, it’s only afterward that some things started to make less sense that I thought they did originally.

I think it’s just the way that Harness writes, and I 100% totally and unequivocally love and respect it. I’m in awe of it. I’m madly jealous of it.

One thing about this book is that it never really tells us when it takes place. I assumed, for the most part, that it was in the present day, author time. But it would just occasionally drop stuff in to make me question that. The main thing is that there are machines that can detect auras. It’s what the casinos use to prevent psychics from getting in. At another point there’s a blasé reference to an unmanned probe heading toward Alpha Centauri.

It’s not until nearly the very end of the book that I caught the first reference to an actual time period, and even that’s not overly helpful. All I know for sure is that this book takes place somewhere in the 21st century.

But the main thing that made me wonder is that there are computer programs called What-If. They began as a military school thing, allowing young officers-to-be to adjust the parameters of a historical battle and see what might have happened.

The What-If programs are insanely robust and detailed, and nobody questions the results. They’re taken for granted as the exact thing that would very definitely have happened.

For one example: Late in the book Alix runs a What-If that results in the Confederacy winning the Civil War and becoming an independent nation. The What-If machine not only verifies that this is what would happen, it also produces a version of the Gettysburg Address as read by Jefferson Davis. The full text of it.

And everybody’s like “Wow, crazy. But unquestionably correct.”

Side note: Alix worked as a What-If programmer before pursuing her graduate work. Her main contribution to the field was World History: What-If God had created Eve first, then made Adam from one of her ribs? It’s noted that this discovery was noteworthy in that it offended literally everyone everywhere.

Anyway, I bring all that up because, somehow or another, Colonel Birch decided that the best way to get the South to win the Battle of Gettysburg was to have Edgar Allan Poe be a Confederate general there. It has to do with Poe’s apparent bloodthirstiness, as evidenced by his writing in our reality.

William decides that yeah, taking on this project is a totally good idea.

You know what? Never once in this book does anyone think of how this history might pan out for, you know, enslaved people. People owned by other people, and the people who own them. Like property. You know, slavery. Owning people. Literally owning people. Owning. People. Human beings.

No, William jumps on board because this means he’ll get his Ph.D. A lot of this book details how determined he is to get that piece of paper. He would literally do anything to get it.

Alix gets signed on, too, since she’s an expert at Poe’s writing and what it says about his psyche.

There are very large chunks of this book spent analyzing the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Charles Harness obviously did his homework. It’s all very detailed. A lot of it is the kind of “this syllable shows up thirty-three times in his collected works, and it sounds a little like a syllable in his wife’s name” kind of stuff that would have made my eyes roll if I weren’t quite invested in this book otherwise.

William travels through time via soul travel or whatever, and sure enough, he meets Edgar Allan Poe.

It probably won’t surprise you to know that Poe turns out to be an expert OB practitioner himself. He travels through time all willy-nilly. When William first shows up at Poe’s deathbed, Poe recognizes him. Was expecting him. Mentions that they’ve met before.

Hereabouts the book did one of the things I hate it when time travel narratives do. It’s the “We’ve met before/This is our first time meeting” shtick. Now, on its face this isn’t a bad bit. What makes it bad is when a character just doesn’t get it. Hypothetically:

“Steve, it’s good to meet you again,” said the Chronoduke.

“But we’ve never met before,” said the freedok.

“Right! This is the first time we’ve met, but it’s also the fifth time!”

“What?”

“We’ve met before, even though this is the first time you’ve ever seen me!”

“I don’t get it.”

“Goodbyeeeee, until the next first time!”

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT”

Like, maybe it’s because I’ve read a lot of science fiction, but if someone came up to me and said something like “nice to meet you again for the first time,” I’d immediately assume that one of us is time travelling right now, and likely will again.

And if the narrative already has explicit time travel of some variety, like this book, it certainly shouldn’t take someone most of the novel to figure out that the solution is oh yeah time right.

William and Poe have a lot of back-and-forth stuff, where Poe will mention a date or an event, William will come back to the present and talk to Alix about what it all means, she’ll come up with crazy-specific details from, like, “The Tell-Tale Heart” a few times to prove that Poe means something, and William will go to that time and place to start again.

It all comes down to a particular card game, and the number thirteen. Yeah, in case you were wondering about that weird thirteen at the beginning of the book, it was all Poe’s doing. Also Poe was one of the mystery people, the one that recognized William’s spirit form.

The mystery resolves amid a lot of philosophical meandering about he nature of creativity and its relation to madness and tragedy. Honestly, it was that part that I enjoyed more!

A whole chapter, chapter nine, is a little vignette about certain historical figures talking to God before coming down to Earth to do their stuff. We get all these imagined conversations, where Beethoven tells God that he wants to write the greatest nine symphonies ever written, to which God replies that this is a good idea, and the price is that you’ll be stone deaf. Or Keats, dying at 26. Van Gogh having no recognition in his lifetime. That sort of things. It’s an odd little bit that stands out in an otherwise pretty darned odd book. I loved it, though.

Finally we learn that the key point in Poe’s history that needs changing is a card game while he was in college. In reality, he lost that card game and plummeted into debt, causing him to drop out of school and return home, whereupon he took up the life of a writer. If history can be altered that Poe wins the game, he’ll live the life of a courtly Virginia gentleman and join the Army, become a general, and win the Battle of Gettysburg.

William sets up this huge, elaborate setpiece involving all of the thesis committee for him and Alix. He causes all of them, even that wretched old Dean, to OB with him, whereupon they recreate that fateful card game. I’ll admit I don’t actually understand why all this had to happen, but it did, and at the time I was fine with it.

William has rigged the deck so that Poe has no choice but to win this game. Because all of the pertinent college faculty are there, they’ll have no choice but to give William his doctorate, and also Alix because all of her psycho-symbology research brought it about.

Not mentioned: How, exactly, any of this will matter if history is changed so dramatically that none of it can possibly take place. Also not mentioned: About four million enslaved human beings.

Everything works to a tee, except that in the end, Poe still loses the card game. It turns out that Poe is also a card psi, and a very good one, and he actually set this all up so that he could lose the game after all.

Apparently, the real timeline has Poe winning and all that. Throughout the book, Poe has been manipulating William just for this purpose. Mega-psychic Edgar Allan Poe saw the future and couldn’t let it happen.

For the slaves?

No, for the poems.

Colonel Birch (who was present at the psychic thesis defense) drops dead for some reason, but also for some reason William and Alix take it for granted that he also traveled back in time to Gettysburg, where he was able to win the battle and the war. But this was in an alternate timeline, so it doesn’t effect anything in the book.

Also, Birch had a pretty sizable supply of Confederate gold stashed away in a Swiss account, and now William and Alix get all of it? Because the non-profit CSA was, in actuality, Birch and Birch alone?

And so the book has a happy ending for literally everybody. And also literarily everybody.

I won’t try to justify my enjoyment of this book. I know I just painted it as garbage. It really wasn’t. So much of it didn’t really make sense, but I feel like that’s either intentional or at least to the benefit of the thing. It’s just that trying to tell other people about it in a concrete summarization doesn’t do it any kind of justice.

And howdy gee did the publishers not do it any favors. Everything about the outside of this book made it seem like it would be horrible. But in a fun way. I didn’t get any fun horribleness this week, and I’m a bit disappointed. Instead I got something that was quite good in a dreamlike way that makes me wish I could write like that. Plus a lot of meditation on the nature of creativity, which yeah, can come across as a little masturbatory in some cases but not in this one.

And, most importantly, I wanna go read some Poe now. Weird.

]]>https://schlock-value.com/2018/11/25/lurid-dreams/feed/4timalmightyThe Time Machine Did Ithttps://schlock-value.com/2018/11/11/the-time-machine-did-it/
https://schlock-value.com/2018/11/11/the-time-machine-did-it/#commentsSun, 11 Nov 2018 23:00:14 +0000http://schlock-value.com/?p=8370Continue reading The Time Machine Did It]]>The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder
Kennydale Books, 2002
Price I paid: It was a birthday present

I probably should have realized a lot earlier that this book doesn’t have any back matter. No cover matter at all, in fact. Not even artwork. That’s okay. I’ll get into that in a minute. I just felt like something needed to go in this space.

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves for nigh on a decade. Maybe more. It was a birthday gift from my friend Eric, from back when he was my roommate Eric. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but I just felt Death whispering in my ear.

I picked this one because it has a time machine in it, and I thought that last week’s would have a time machine in it and it didn’t, so, like, I just wanted to read something with a time machine in it. Tempus interruptus, or something.

This one violates a few of my usual rules, but I think it’s justified. For one, it’s pretty new. Swartzwelder released this book in 2003. Also, it’s self-published. I didn’t know that when I started reading. I thought it was perhaps just a very small publishing house that couldn’t afford, you know, anything. I avoid reviewing the self-pub market because it would feel a little too much like punching down, and that’s not something I want to do. I know it’s a fine line, but a fella’s got to have principles.

This book is a little different, though, since it was written by a Somebody.

The cover of the book makes it clear who we’re dealing with, just in case you weren’t aware of him. Fifty-nine episodes of The Simpsons is leagues ahead of any other writer, even as the show is rapidly approaching its thirty-three billionth episode. What makes it even better is that the list of episodes he wrote puts him behind many of the very best episodes, including my favorite, “You Only Move Twice.”

Swartzwelder retired from The Simpsons in 2003 and has since self-published a book a year, beginning with this one. I’m told that most of the other books are follow-ups to The Time Machine Did It, so I’ll probably have to find them.

Swartzwelder is also famously reclusive and averse to any kind of press. I suppose that might explain why he chose to self-pub all of his books? This one was certainly good enough to get traditionally published, at least after some basic editing. I just suppose he didn’t want to deal with all of the ancillary stuff like book tours, book signings, media appearances, and all of the other self-promotion things.

What makes this frustrating is that this book was good. Very good. Readable and hilarious. It was chock full of so many great one-liners that I could hardly take it. The plot was zany and bananas but I didn’t have any trouble following it. Everything worked on the same sort of dream logic that you might find in a classic Warner Brothers cartoon.

Despite me saying it was cartoon-like, I want to make it clear that this book never once came across as a Simpsons episode with the serial numbers filed off. This was a thing entirely of its own. Sure, maybe once or twice I read a line that I could imagine Homer or someone saying, but with a book so full of great lines, that kind of thing would be inevitable. Let’s get into some nitty-gritty.

Our hero is Frank Burly. His real name is Edward R. Torgeson, Jr., but he changed it because that’s not a very good name for a detective. Right off the bat we get a good feeling for the book and the character we’re dealing with: He wanted a name that invoked burliness, so he changed his name to Burly.

Frank is as dumb as they get. Unlike most of the books I read with dumb protagonists, Frank was intentionally dumb. In fact, he’s well aware of how dumb he is. He comments on it. He owns it.

He’s also utterly hapless. Nothing good ever happens to him. Again, this is established by the very opening of the book, which begins with Frank getting punched in the gut several times. We soon learn that this is because detective work wasn’t going very well, so he hired himself out as a bodyguard by a spoiled rich kid. Sure enough, someone started to mess with the spoiled rich kid, so he stepped in. It turned out that the other guy was a bodyguard hired by another spoiled rich kid, and the two spoiled rich kids were just bored and decided to hire some bodyguards and watch them fight.

At this point I’m starting to like this book and think I know what it’s going to be all about, but I’m also starting to get a little dismayed. This book needed a copy-editor. It’s hard for me to say that, since the idiosyncrasies of spelling and grammar eventually seemed to add to the charm, but at first I wasn’t thinking that. All I was thinking was that certain words were being capitalized that didn’t need it, that commas weren’t happening in places where they should and vice versa, and that there were a lot of sentences that were either run-ons, fragments, or somehow both.

Of these, the sentence structure is the most excusable. It comes across as an attempt to imitate the sort of hard-boiled, noir detective that Burly would love to be. All the rest of it is fine, too, if you assume that this book is being written by Frank Burly himself. And you know what? I’m gonna run with that.

Burly is approached by a man named Thomas Dewey Mandible The Third. Mandible has a problem. His entire family fortune has vanished overnight, and he has no idea how. One night he went to bed in his mansion, and the next morning he woke up in the gutter. He tasks Burly with figuring out what happened, and with recovering a golden figurine shaped like the statue of Lady Justice.

Burly figures that the guy is crazy, but takes the job anyway. The book then goes into a rapid-fire series of vignettes wherein Frank gets beaten up, nearly killed, arrested, beaten some more, locked up, captured, insulted, and beaten some more again. It seems that a lot of people are very intent on him not finding out what he’s looking to find out.

All is revealed when he gets locked up with a fellow named Professor Groggins who, as it turns out, has invented a time machine. It’s shaped like a briefcase. Criminals took it from him and then locked him up and forced him to make them more inventions. He hasn’t succeeded on any of those. Still, the time machine works, and the criminals are going willy-nilly with it, robbing history blind.

It was around here when everything about the book really clicked inside my head and I knew exactly what I was reading. At first I was trying to put it together in some kind of realistic-but-humorous way that just wasn’t working. When I realized that I was reading a cartoon, it all fell together. This book was zany.

The main problem with time travel, we learn, is that the criminals using it are so careless. It’s not necessarily that they’re careless with history, although they are, it’s that they’re careless with the time machine itself. A criminal will use it to travel to the past, rob it blind, come back, and then chuck the machine into the back of the nearest moving vehicle since they don’t need it anymore. This makes it easy for Burly to get hold of it once he gets free.

Burly is too dumb to figure out how to use it (although he points out to the reader that they’d be too dumb to use it too, although they’re handsome, damned handsome). As a result he ends up creating a bunch of time paradoxes that result in there being hundreds of Frank Burlys walking around. He decides to go back a few minutes in time to stop himself from doing that and then overshoots a bit, winding up in 1941.

Frank spends a good bit of the book trapped in 1941. He’s trapped because he forgot to turn on the time machine’s emergency brake, so it went back to the present after a few minutes. The bits in 1941 are some of my favorites. Burly tries so hard to make the time period work for him, but he just fails over and over again. At one point, for instance, he manages to re-create the scripts to several major motion pictures, line for line, from memory. He tries to sell them to Hollywood, who tells him that they’re terrible. He gets mad because he knows they’re right.

I know I said it before but this book was so damned full of great one-liners. Here are some of them:

On another wall was a sign that said “DO IT TOMORROW”. I got it cheap because it’s bad advice. (8)

Though they admitted that in the unlikely event of a nuclear attack, the public would probably have to go screw themselves, they stressed that this was a worse case scenario. (53)

I approached the registration desk at the nearest five star hotel—unaccountably named the PreWar Hilton—and explained that I wished to get a room. They asked how long I would be staying and I said no more than 62 years, hopefully less. (80)

“This is a covert operation, people!” he shouted over his bullhorn. “Covert!” (105)

Burly gets back home after he steals the time machine from another time traveler that he happens to see. This other time traveler is also stealing the golden Justice statue that Burly was tasked to find earlier, so that’s convenient too.

Burly gets back to 2003 and talks to Mandible again, who gives him the full story about how his grandfather was elected District Attorney and was also a very wealthy man and a great philanthropist which was why—before the time travel happened—there were museums and hospitals and libraries named after him that aren’t there any more.

Mandible, Sr. made his fortune by taking bribes from the mob, specifically the part of the mob that took contracts for buildings and then made very bad ones and ran off with the surplus money, AKA regular capitalism HAHA OH SNAP. The time period was even later referred to as the Golden Age of Criminal Architecture. Mandible later felt bad about his actions, but was the sort of person who could never throw a document away, so he took all of his papers that referred to bribes he’d taken and had them origami’d into a statue of Justice, which he then had painted gold.

In an altered timeline, that statue of Justice was stolen and exposed to the world, so Mandible lost a DA election bid and all his money, and because this book doesn’t even have to try to make sense when it comes to time travel, his descendants still exist and even remember that they once had money.

Burly even goes to Professor Groggins at one point and asks him why some people remember the unaltered past and certain things happened the way they did without there being paradoxes and stuff, among other time travel-type questions. In a moment that, if replicated, would improve the text of about a million crappy science fiction books, the professor says he has no idea.

Burly goes back to 1941 to fix the timeline, but this time he’s followed by cops from 2003, in a new time machine, who want to stop him. What results is a madcap chase through space and time that

…accidentally altered the chronology of world history a little bit. I’m embarrassed to report. For example, the Civil War now happened BEFORE the Civil War. And when the Titanic sank it landed on the Bismarck. With Noah’s Ark on top of that. Don’t ask me how these things are possible. I just wreck history. I don’t explain it. (127)

He also manages to kill a younger version of himself, marries his own mother, and kills something that was trying to evolve into him.

It finally works out, and in the end Professor Groggins is able to fix everything except for a few bits of history that were too broken to take care of, so now we all have to live in the history where Nixon was president instead of Lou Costello’s comedy partner, for example.

And that’s the book.

I know that describing a comedy book is a hard task and that I did a pretty poor job of it. I’d argue that it’s impossible to convey to someone that a book was funny without them reading it themselves. That’s just the nature of humor. Categorizing it into types of comedy and they providing examples is probably worse. Everybody knows that E.B. White line about how explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, but what’s amazing is that I just googled the line to make sure it wasn’t apocryphal or something and it turns out it kind of is, because White’s comment was phrased

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
—”Some Remarks on Humor,” preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)

and I only bring that up because the original quote is so much better.

I love E.B. White.

In the end, you should read this book for yourself if you think you’d like it. I do want to state again that this is very much a self-published novel and that it really could have used some copy-editing, so if that sort of thing upsets you, you’ll probably not want to read this one. I think the main reason I’ve waited so long to read this after receiving it is that I cracked it open after getting it as a gift, saw the state of the prose, and politely set it aside.

Sorry, Eric. I know you meant well in giving this to me as a birthday present, and I’m glad to report that eventually I did end up liking it. A lot.

I want to close out by reporting a phenomenon that I’ve noticed before in my life but was only reminded of it enough to talk about it when I read this book. I can’t think of a better name for this phenomenon than I Could Have Written That.

This is very different from such phenomena as I Could Do This, or I Could Do Better Than This, or I Had This Idea Four Years Ago Why Didn’t I Do Anything About It.

I Could Have Written Thatcomes around when you’re taking in a piece of media, and a line or a verse or whatever strikes you as so incredibly you that it takes you by surprise. It’s a moment that makes you think that somewhere in these infinitely complex brains that we have, two neurons lined up the same way in two different ones and resulted in a perfect synchronicity of style and content.

It might better be described as This Sounds Exactly Like Something I Would Have Said.

I had a number of moments like that in this book, which might be why I liked it so much. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head to reproduce, and even if I could I don’t think it would help anything because this is the single most subjective feeling in the entire world.

It’s funny because it’s a feeling of intense connection with another person across time and space, and yet it’s so indescribable, so unrelatable, that it makes you feel alone because there’s absolutely no way you could ever make it clear to another person how you feel.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, the men involved in the top-secret Ridgerunner project are about to complete work on the first rocket designed to probe beyond the solar system, and Secret Service agents in that city are becoming frantic over the presence of one Gilbert Nash, a man without a past.

The investigation of Nash began when it was discovered that he subscribed to every journal of science currently published in the free world—archeology [sic], geology, astronomy, meteorology, chemistry, medicine and, most disturbing of all, nuclear physics. Was he merely showing a healthy interest in science, or perhaps something more sinister? Determined to find out, the government agents are soon plunged into the most baffling and frustrating case of any of their careers.

Every fact they uncover only adds to the mystery surrounding Nash’s identity. He seems to have come into existence out of nowhere on March 8th, 1940, the date the United States decided in earnest to build an atomic bomb, and then migrated to Knoxville just in advance of the establishment of the Ridgerunner project. On the door to his office appear only his name and the word “Investigations.” And, although Nash gave his age as 31 in 1940, he appears not to have aged a day since that time.

When a key member of the Ridgerunner project goes to Nash’s office and then commits suicide a few days later, the search for Nash’s true identity and purpose becomes desperately urgent. But only Shirley Hoffman, secretary to one of the agents, is able to get close enough to Nash to actually converse with him. What he says adds a new and frightening dimension to the ever deepening mystery.

While dining, he begins to tell her the story of Gilgamesh, hero of an epic written thousands of years ago in ancient Assyria. Supposedly immortal, Gilgamesh was a man whose origins were either unknown or unrecorded, and who stalked through the land accomplishing mighty deeds.

As the story of Gilgamesh unfolds, Shirley Hoffman begins to wonder just what Nash’s interest in this ancient tale is—and by the time he reaches the end of the epic, she learns the incredible and terrifying answer.

THE TIME MASTERS is a compelling novel of science fiction that will hold readers i the grip of suspense until the very end. As the identity of Gilbert Nash is revealed—and the countdown begins that will blast the first rocket outside of the solar system—the book builds to an unforgettable and shattering climax.

I’ve read Wilson Tucker before and I didn’t have much intention of revisiting him, but this book turned out to be a very special case. I only became aware of it after a reader got in contact with me after reading Resurrection Days. They had a question about the book they thought I could answer. It turned out I didn’t have that information, but it set me scouring the Internet. I never did find the answer the reader was looking for, but I did hit upon this review of The Time Masters, which had a very interesting line:

The novel is set in the early 70s, and takes place in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I don’t know if I’ve made it super clear up to this point, but I live in Knoxville. I had to find this book and read it.

And so I did, meaning that I’ve probably read every single science fiction novel set in Knoxville. That’s an achievement!

This Interlibrary Loan copy is courtesy of the E.W. King Library of King College, Bristol, Tennessee. Many thanks to them! That’s also why I had to nab cover art from elsewhere, and why I don’t have any jacket information.

Diligent readers might remember that the beginning of The Christ Clone Trilogy took place in Knoxville. Whether we decide that those books are science fiction or not—and it’s still up in the air—I think it only solidifies my position as the expert in Knoxville-based scientifiction.

Like Resurrection Days, The Time Masters was a book with a lot of issues that was nonetheless a breezy, fun read. This might be a Wilson Tucker hallmark, but two books don’t make a very good sample size.

The novel’s hero is Gilbert Nash. We find out right away that something weird is up with Nash. For one, the book starts with a prologue in which a spaceship explodes and some unnamed characters bail and find themselves heading toward an unnamed blue planet. After that, we get a chapter where two government men, Misters Dikty and Cummings, are discussing a mysterious fellow who showed up in Knoxville with no history. He just sorta materialized and set up shop as a detective. Our government men from an unnamed agency think that this is awfully fishy because of Knoxville’s proximity to Oak Ridge.

I also love that this is the only science fiction book I’ve read that mentions Oak Ridge, and honestly, that’s a lot odder than books not mentioning Knoxville. Knoxville’s not got a lot going on for it. It’s a wonderful little town—I love it here—but beyond the Sunsphere, which didn’t even exist when Tucker was writing this novel, there’s not much to go on that would merit some sci-fi. I’d love to be proven wrong about that.

Oak Ridge, on the other hand, should be at least worth referencing more often. It’s where America’s nuclear program started! All these books I’ve read about scientists working for the government in towns built for that purpose—and there have to be at least a half-dozen of them—and not one of them takes place in America’s original Secret City.

Recommended reading: The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan.

It might also be worth noting that several characters in this book refer to the town as “The Ridge,” and I have never, ever heard anyone say that.

So off the bat we know that Gilbert Nash is something weird and funny, and due to the title of this book I assumed it meant he was some sort of time traveler. Nevermind that the book started off with a spaceship exploding. I thought that this would be explained away. Spaceships can also be timeships. That’s a thing. It turns out that no, he is not a time traveler, and we learn this over the course of lots and lots of exposition dumps over the rest of the novel. Not much else happens. This book is largely people sitting around and talking.

Our first dump of this kind comes when we first meet Nash properly. He’s interviewing a potential client, a man named Gregg Hodgkins. Hodgkins is a scientist over at Oak Ridge, although he lives in Knoxville, which isn’t unusual. Google tells me that if I wanted to commute to the Y-12 complex every day it would only be about a half hour each way, which is good podcast time. If I had to do it in 1971, I’d die of boredom.

I want to mention that it took me a long time to decide whether or not this book was set contemporary to its writing. I don’t think it ever says so outright, and for a long time I felt like it was set in the 40s when Oak Ridge was a big secret. It would have explained our Federal Agent characters and their interest. They do say that Nash first appeared on March 8, 1940. When one of the feds asks the other what that date means to them, they say it’s their grandson’s birthday, which is not only a weird bit of detail but also a problem. If this conversation is taking place in ’71 or thereabouts, we have a character with a thirty-year-old grandson, which would, in turn, make the character a federal agent who is at least seventy years old. That’s not impossible, but it seems out of place. There’s no other direct or indirect reference to his age.

I suspect that this is a result of this novel being a revised edition of one from 1953. That would make a lot more sense timing-wise. It would not, however, make sense to think that this edition takes place wholly in 1953 because this one mentions contemporary things like the Apollo program. I think it’s probably just a line of dialogue that got missed in the revision process.

Anyway, Hodgkins. Hodgkins needs Nash to help find his wife, Carolyn. She’s disappeared. Moreover, we get this really weird sexist bit here. Part of the interminable exposition of this part reveals that Hodgkins was initially attracted to his wife because she was so intelligent (also physically attractive). This isn’t the problem. The problem is that he says that it’s important for a man to have an intelligent wife, but it’s also important that she not be as intelligent as he is. A man naturally has to feel superior, says this character. So the problem with their marriage is that it turns out that Carolyn is actually a lot smarter than he is.

Now, this is dialogue, coming from a character, and is not necessarily the feelings of the author. I get that. I’m still not wild about it.

Along the way, Hodgkins reveals that his wife has some interesting things going on, things that match up perfectly with the description of Nash that we got from the federal agents in their interminable exposition only one chapter ago. Of note is that they have fairly dark skin (they “look Egyptian”) and the corneas of their eyes are yellowish, although I think maybe the author meant sclera there? Nash is suddenly very interested in this woman’s whereabouts, although we don’t learn exactly why until later.

Despite this book’s massive exposition dumps, it actually doles out relevant information just a little at a time. On one hand, this is kind of nice. It means we don’t get all the things we need to know at once and so we get a bit of a mystery vibe going on. Tucker also wrote mysteries, so I think he knew what he was doing there. On the other hand, this process makes us fully aware of just how much fluff the book has that is not useful to the story at all. When we go twenty pages between pertinent information but we’ve had the characters sitting around and talking that whole time, the reader becomes aware that the book is getting tedious. Also, a lot of that information is stuff that Nash already knows, so I felt like he was deliberately withholding information and that bothered me too.

To be fair, the book sailed along at a fair clip. The long periods of character chatter worked out a bit better than I’ve let on because the characters had some personality and were moderately fun to read.

Most of that stuff happens once Nash meets Shirley Hoffman. He first meets her after Gregg Hodgkins turns up dead. It’s meant to look like a suicide, but Nash thinks the wife did it. He also thinks the wife is a touch telepath. His reasoning is not explored until a little while later, although he makes it clear that this is a skill the ancient Sumerians had.

All this while I’m still thinking that this is a book about time travelers.

Hoffman is Dikty’s secretary. Dikty puts her onto Nash because she’s an attractive young woman who might get him to talk. And boy howdy, does she get him to talk. Most of the middle of this book is just talking about ancient civilizations and, in particular, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Right around here is when I first made an important connection, namely that Gilbert Nash = Gilgamesh, but I was still thinking that this was a matter of time travel.

I’d like to note that this book spends a fair amount of time at the public library. I find this great because not only do I love public libraries in general, I love my public library in particular, and so this book actually takes place in my workplace. Except it doesn’t, for two reasons.

The inside-baseball reason that no one would care about is that the current Lawson McGhee Library building opened in 1971, which is the same year this revised edition of the book came out, so if Tucker was thinking of my library, he was thinking of the old location a few blocks away.

But the main reason it doesn’t take place in my library is that this book doesn’t really take place in Knoxville. I know what you’re thinking, so bear with me a minute here.

When a book is set in a geographical location that exists in real life, it can do so in two ways. The author can make the real-life setting a part of the plot, doing research and making sure their characters act within the confines of the real place and its physical and social geographies. The author might attempt to capture the “feel” of the place. This happens a lot with New york. Think of how many narratives you’ve read that have talked about the “real” New York. It’s a thing. They’ll usually reference certain streets. Now I, a resident of the flyover state that directly led to the world’s only aggressive use of nuclear weaponry, won’t necessarily get the meaning behind having our character meet another character on, say, 53rd street, but someone in the know or someone who felt like doing a little research would recognize that our character is probably somewhere near MoMA or Studio 54 or the setting of a Ramones song, with all the implications and overtones thereto.

The opposite of that is saying that your book takes place in a place, and that’s it. Everything else is made up and the book has no bearing to the actual location. At best, you get a generic reference to a stereotypical version of a city (Nashville is where the country music comes from, but I’m not going to bother to figure out what river runs through the city).

The Time Masters takes place in “Knoxville” because the author wanted it to take place near Oak Ridge. But it doesn’t take place in Knoxville. Wilson Tucker didn’t feel the need to learn about Market Square (“the most democratic place on earth”), or the historic Tennessee Theatre, or the creepy old graveyard at First Presbyterian right behind it that I love so much, or the oldest public library in the state, or the hotel that killed Hank Williams.

I guess we once had a pretty good college football team too.

I say this like it’s some kind of huge travesty but it’s not. It’s how 95% of all media works, and it’s not a problem at all. The important thing is the story, not slavish attention to real life detail. A story isn’t real life and it shouldn’t be. The story comes first. If the story warrants mention of real life detail, then that’s fine, use it. (But try to get it right).

Recommended Knoxville reading: Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, A Death in the Family by James Agee.

On the other other hand, you get movies and television shows that feel the need to really really hammer home where their thing is located, so every window in our protagonist’s apartment or office has a landmark outside of it.

Um, so what it all turns out is that Nash is an alien who crash landed on Earth about 10,000 years ago. At one point he inspired the story of Gilgamesh. Carolyn Hodgkins was another alien and she’s a bad alien and she influenced some cultures to do some bad things. There were other aliens that landed, but they’re all dead now. Nash’s alien biology gives him a very long life by human standards, but it’s actually a bit shorter than it should be because the water on Earth isn’t quite right. He and Carolyn need “heavy water,” which on Earth was a result of the nuclear program. Once he got it, though, it turned out to be too late and not useful so he’s resigned to dying eventually.

Carolyn, on the other hand, just wants off this rock. For years she’s been using her seductive powers and touch telepathy to gain information from scientists working on space travel. It turns out that there’s a secret space travel program being worked on in Oak Ridge that uses nuclear energy. The rocket should be able to get Carolyn back home if she’s able to steal it.

We learn all of this by sitting and talking. At the end of the book there’s a bit of action where Nash tries to stop Carolyn, but he fails. She’s able to steal the ship.

There’s a bit of a weird ending where it cuts to the ship taking off and changing course…and that’s it. That’s the ending.

This first printing of the revised version contains the gutter code “B40” [verified] on page 185. It is also missing the last 4 paragraphs of the last chapter. These were restored in the second printing with a gutter code “C15”.

I checked, and yep, I have the first printing. I’m missing the ending of the book.

I’m not sure how important those last four paragraphs are, but I’m curious. It bugs me that I just reviewed this book without having finished it. Maybe that’s only a technicality, but it stings. So I’m asking readers: If you have a copy of this book with the full ending, would it be possible for you to get that page to me somehow? I’ll give you massive props.

There’s also a sequel that I might track down but that’s all on me.

This wasn’t a bad book, but it’s unlikely I would have cared enough about it to seek it out without the hometown connection. Tucker’s The Lincoln Hunters sounds like something I’d like to read. It has a fun-sounding premise. Hopefully it’s better told than either this book or Resurrection Days, which both had problems of structure and major problems of ending. Who knows?

EDIT: I’ve had a couple of people hit me up about the missing final paragraphs. Many thanks to Rimon Kade in the comments below, who also provided the jacket copy to the Signet first edition, and Jim Stokes on Twitter for the information.

Basically, Carolyn steals the ship and takes off. The narration switches to a thing that details the events as they occur according to how high the ship has gotten. It gets higher and higher and faster and faster. It would appear that Carolyn dies. This is not a particularly great ending.

I suppose it’s possible that the ’71 revised edition had a different ending from either of these Signet first editions, but I’m not sure how different it could be, or whether it would matter.

So many thanks to both of you for the information!

EDIT 2: I found the inside flap copy for this edition! It’s incredibly long! I’ve added it up top.